She gave birth to her first child in 1959 and went on to have six more, one of whom died in infancy. Like a shiny, new ornament dangling on a Christmas tree she fit in perfectly learning to speak Bahasa Malaysia fluently and to cook Chinese and Malay dishes. She arrived in Malaysia as if she had always been there. So we seldom asked.Īt the age of 24, she migrated to Malaysia from India with her new husband – my grandfather, a police inspector and former soldier in the British Malaya army. If probed further, she would simply ignore the question or change the topic. When asked about Partition, she would answer just that “bad things happened”. My grandmother, however, never spoke of any of this. The acrid scent of death and destruction embedded itself into the nations’ topography. Women drowned themselves to avoid being raped, their bloated bodies floating through contaminated, blood-stained rivers.
Reports of trains dripping in blood and railways blanketed with the dead led to these treacherous journeys becoming known as “blood trains”. According to a report by the Australian Associated Press in September 1947, one massacre left 3,000 Muslim passengers dead. Trains shuffling refugees back and forth between the newly formed nations were filled with corpses and gangs of vengeful men armed with swords. One of the largest-ever mass migrations, the Partition left as many as two million people dead and up to 100,000 women kidnapped or raped. Millions of Muslims headed to West and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) while millions of Hindus and Sikhs, like my grandmother, migrated to India. Like an estimated 15 million others, she was a refugee – forced to leave her home as the subcontinent was divided into two separate nation-states: Pakistan and India. The journey would take her to Kalka, a sleepy Indian town in the foothills of the Himalayas. Sometime in mid-August 1947, my grandmother, Abnash Kaur, then about 12 years of age, boarded a train with her family from Lahore in what is now Pakistan.