Partition: Killer and the shadow

A thoughtless murder carried out during the bloodiest chapter in the subcontinent’s history refused to stay in the past, compelling the perpetrator to live with the memory of his deed

I glimpsed the other side of India’s Independence, in startling images, through a book I read last week—Meenakshie Verma’s Aftermath: An Oral History of Violence. Published in 2004, the most intriguing story in Aftermath, an ethnographic study of perpetrators and victims of violence, is that of a man who began to see a shadow years after he killed a person during the bloody months of the Partition. The shadow would appear to him whenever he was alone. He failed to banish the shadow from his life. What was this shadow all about?

The clues to the puzzle of the shadow lie in the man’s past. His name: Heera Lal. He spent his childhood in Matta village, Taxila district, now in Pakistan, where he grew up in a large extended family. His memory of the life in Matta, recounted to Verma over several months, seemed bereft of communal animosity.

As the British prepared to leave India, it began to be said in Matta that “non-Muslims will go to Hindustan.”  But the Muslim elders assured the non-Muslims that the talk of transfer of population was a passing phenomenon. Heera Lal remembered the village maulvi saying, “Of late, our youth have been influenced by some urban elements who talk about creating a rift among people. We have lived in this pind (village) for generations. A few fiery speeches should not affect our love and respect for each other.”

Soon, a group of Muslims, accompanied by some locals, came to Matta.  They said the non-Muslims should either convert to Islam or leave for Hindustan. Before they could choose, an Army convoy came to the village, offering to ferry away those wishing to cross into India. On the day of their departure, Heera Lal reminisced, the Muslims turned up to bid them goodbye. There was much hugging and crying.

Heera Lal and his family arrived in Rohtak, now in Haryana. Amidst doing odd jobs, he would hang around with Rohtak’s boys. One day, they saw a man dressed as Banias would in those days, in a fine dhoti, a silk kurta, an embroidered cap, sporting gold earrings and rings on fingers.

One of the boys said, “I can bet my life that this person is a Muslim disguised as a Bania.” How can you be so sure, Heera Lal asked. “I can smell his fear,” the boy riposted. He said in case it was proved that the Bania was Muslim, would Heera Lal stab him? “It was madness that I agreed to this game,” Heera Lal told Verma.
The boys stripped the Bania, and found he was circumcised. When Heera Lal dithered to stab the man, the others jeered him, mocking him for not being masculine enough to kill, a trait they said was common to all refugees, evident from their fleeing Pakistan instead of fighting for their land and property.

Enraged, Heera Lal plunged a knife into the Muslim’s belly. A gush of blood splattered Heera Lal. He stabbed the dying Muslim two more times. Then he ran to the railway track and jumped into a wagon of a goods train going to Delhi.

In the Capital, another refugee helped Heera Lal buy a cart of bananas to sell. With time, he acquired an economic foothold, even began to send money to his family in Rohtak, but never visited the town. When Verma met Heera Lal, he was in his seventies, had married Pushpa Devi, sired four children, owned a store and a two-bedroom flat, both decrepit.

It was Pushpa Devi who revealed to Verma about the shadow in her husband’s life. They shifted to different localities and switched houses, but the shadow did not leave Heera Lal. The family, said Pushpa Devi, encountered many difficulties because of his vaham, his delusion. The pandits and a shaman they consulted were unanimous in their opinion that the “ghost (chaya)” lived in his mind.

When Verma asked Heera Lal about the shadow, he said, “It’s only when I am alone, I see somebody with a bent head standing in the corner,” he said. Somebody? It was a person, then. Heera Lal gradually became reconciled to living with the shadow. “It does not harm me. It is there like an irritant… So now if I do not see the shadow, I wonder where it has gone. Now I can say that it bothers me if I do not see it.”

Was the shadow a projection of his reproachful self? Why was the shadow’s head always bent? Did it signify the Muslim he killed to affirm his masculinity? I emailed such questions to Verma. She replied, “Shadows can be perceived and interpreted in multiple ways. One of the primary meanings in this context is the reminder of the primal conflict between the Good and the Evil.”

Quite tellingly, Verma concluded, “There are dozens of Heera Lals in the social landscape. Some of them repent and seek forgiveness relentlessly from the unseen world.” It might be the case that by living with the shadow, born out of his own anguish, Heera Lal also learnt to live with the memory of the crime he could not efface.

The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste

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