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Not quite Train to
Pakistan Bajira
Partition spawned many works of fiction centring on the tragic happenings that accompanied India’s Independence. Similarly, works of fiction revolving around the tragic decade of militancy have appeared. But one has yet to come across a literary work that can match the poignancy of Manto’s ‘Toba Tak Singh’ or Krishan Chander’s ‘Peshawar Express’ or Khushwant Singh’s ‘Train to Pakistan’. Here is one more attempt by a bureaucrat to capture the atmosphere in the backdrop of militancy in Punjab. The blurb describes the author to be in a unique position to write on militancy in Punjab, since he has visited all the places mentioned in the book and has drawn the incidents described in it from real life. But despite all this, the net result hardly sways the reader to sympathise or empathise with the characters connected with militancy. It is in fact not one book, but a combination of three stories. First we have Sunil Verma, the bureaucrat, and his wife, Sujata. They lose their young and promising son to gastroenteritis. This tragic family drama is given a supernatural ending where Lord Shiva appears before Sunil as he sits in meditation and explains to him the death of his young son. Then, there is the story of Satwant, a son of a carpenter, whom the father willingly hands over to a leader of the militant movement to "serve the cause". The boy is given training, sent from one camp to another and assigned different tasks. He spends time in the marshes of the Mand area at the confluence of the Sutlej and the Beas in the company of another militant. These are obviously the last days of militancy and he sees his commander and his companion being gunned down by the security forces. Surprisingly, no one takes notice of Satwant lying there with minor injuries. He gets up and returns to his father in his village as quietly as he had joined the militant group. The third story is that of a romance between a Sikh boy (Satwant) and a Christian girl, Rosy, which begins in the house of Sunil Verma, where Satwant had gone to do some repair work on the doors and windows. When he returns after four years as a militant, Rosy accepts him without asking any questions. The problem of their being members of two different religious communities is solved by a bizarre twist in the tale. Rosy and her mother, Bajira, a devout Christian, embrace Sikhism. The book is named after
Rosy’s mother, Waziran, who becomes Bajira after her marriage. Though
she figures prominently in the story, the main characters remain Satwant
and Rosy. |
Any
mention of militancy in Punjab, and you conjure up a picture of
bloodshed, killing of innocent bus passengers, bomb blasts at busy
places, encounters, some real, some fake, dead militants and policemen.
Then you are thankful to God that the phase is over. Such human
tragedies have always given rise to literature relating to different
aspects of the event.