While reviewing this book, a young journalist, Azhar Sohail wrote in 1985 “It was perhaps 1959. I saw my father bring home a small book. While he read the book, he wept incessantly. When he was finished I grabbed the book from his cupboard, completed it within an hour but didn’t cry.
Four years back I read the book again and there were tears in my eyes. Then like a bolt of flash I understood that this book makes you cry when your conscience has matured”
I have just read the book. It didn’t make me cry but yes, I felt this unexplainable anger. I still don’t know at what I was angry. Was it the shallowness of mankind, moral degradation of self-proclaimed religious scholars, depravity of political leaders or was I angry because even after 60 years we are standing exactly where we started. We are still being led by those scholars and leaders. We haven’t learnt a thing.
The book tells the tale of the atrocities faced by a girl at the hands of her own countrymen when she migrated from India in 1947. How she died again and again before her last death. How her colorful and fancy dreams about the new nation were battered and bruised after coming to Pakistan.
It is a far greater tragedy being betrayed by one’s own people. Reading this book is like getting resounding slaps on your face because the story is true and all the characters are real. All those characters are still very much part of our society. They still roam around; prowling and hunting for more. Their thirst is insatiable. This book only tells about one of the thousands such stories. Qudrut was right in saying,
“While I waited at the Wahga Border for my relatives, I witnessed scenes which even after thousand attempts my pen is unable to write down completely”.
Such was the horror of that calamity and such is the sorry situation of today’s Pakistan.
2 comments:
Oh :( this makes my heart bleed. We can't even imagine what physical and mental torture people went through during those days.
I'll give this book a shot and let ya know then, Insha Allah.
Very well written indeed. I have read that and other books by the same author and have been impressed by his craft and honesty. I wish this one book was widely published and included in the texts of Urdu for senior classes in Pakistan.
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