Reader’s Digest
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
Suddenly after years of working
with a major music label, I turned toI 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 mas-
sacre that accompanied this shat-
tering 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 who94 august 2019
I DREAMT OF REACHING
MY ANCESTRAL LAND,
BUT I KNEW IT WAS
NOT TO BE.The author (right) with singer
Shafqat Amanat Ali at Lahore’s
Government College UniversityPREVIOUS^ SPREAD:^ALAMY