Lines Drawn

Tuesday. Two in the morning. Nineteen twenty-six. First water.In April they opened the headworks at Sulemanki (source),and the Sutlej got sent sideways into the desert —the Fordwah, the Eastern Sadiqia, ditch to channel to canal.

My husband gets a square. ਮੁਰੱਬਾ. Twenty-five acres pegged out on a grid (source),in a village with no name. It has a number. Chak something, letters after it.Nobody here is from here. Not us. Not the neighbours. Not the wheat.Not even the water.

ਸਾਡੀ ਵਾਰੀ — ساڈی واری — our turn.Tuesday, two in the morning. Three hours of water.Open the channel, hold the lamp, don't sleep —then it's the next square's.

Tuesday. Two in the morning. Nineteen thirty-six.The desert's gone green in squares, like somebody coloured it in with a ruler.Cotton in summer, wheat in winter, and towns come up by the railway,every one of them a mandi — Chishtian Mandi (source), Haroonabad (source), a place called Dunga Bunga (source).The whole state (source) nearly doubles. Everybody's new. Everybody's from somewhere.

Before us this was grazing. Herders. Camels. Cattle on open ground.The state wrote it down as waste land (source), and waste land has no owners,so they pegged it and handed it out. The herders are still here, at the edges,watching us water what they used to walk.

ਸਾਡੀ ਵਾਰੀ — ساڈی واری — our turn.Tuesday, two in the morning. Three hours of water.Open the channel, hold the lamp, don't sleep —then it's the next square's.

Tuesday. Two in the morning. Nineteen forty-seven. Last water.They drew a line (source) a long way from here, and it came through the village anyway.The Muslim families stay. The Sikh families go. We're the Sikh families.More than twenty years on the square. We leave the plough, the buffalo, the bed.

Next week a family from Jalandhar (source) walks up the same track with nothing,and the government gives them our square. Our number. Our Tuesday.I left the water turn in chalk (source) on the wall by the door.Tuesday. Two in the morning. Three hours. Don't sleep.

ਸਾਡੀ ਵਾਰੀ — ساڈی واری — their turn.Tuesday, two in the morning. Three hours of water.Open the channel, hold the lamp, don't sleep —then it's the next square's.

Nineteen sixty. A treaty gives the Sutlej to India (source).The canals out here get their water from another river now, down a link canal.Nobody here was from here.Not even the water.

ईश्वर अल्लाह तेरो नाम — Ishwar, Allah, both your names.

Twelfth of March, nineteen thirty. An old man in a loincloth (source)walks out of an ashram with seventy-eight followersand walks two hundred and forty miles to the sea.Twenty-four days. At Dandi (source) he bends down, picks up a handful of salty mud,and breaks the law of an empire by making seasoning.

May, Dharasana (source). Rows of men walk up to the salt works and get clubbed down.Row after row. Not one of them lifts a hand. An American reporter wires it to the world.

And a lawyer with two doctorates (source), New York and London,asks the question the march doesn't want: whose freedom?Three years earlier he set fire to the Manusmriti (source),the old law book that ranked people by birth.Twenty years on, he's the one who drafts the Constitution (source).

करो (या मरो!) — do or die.انقلاب (زندہ باد!) — long live the revolution.दिल्ली (चलो!) — on to Delhi.And two and a half million sign up for the King.

Eighth of April, twenty-nine. Two young men drop two bombs in the Assembly (source) —built for noise, not killing — and stand there waiting to be taken,shouting انقلاب زندہ باد. Long live the revolution.A Muslim poet (source) came up with it. A Punjabi atheist made it famous.

Twenty-third of March, nineteen thirty-one. Lahore jail.They hang Bhagat Singh (source) with Rajguru (source) and Sukhdev (source), and he's not yet twenty-four.Twenty-third of March, nineteen forty. Same city. A park across town (source).The Muslim League asks for independent states, north-west and east,and the resolution never says the word Pakistan.That word was made up seven years before, by a student in Cambridge (source).

Same date. Same city.India keeps it (source) for the men they hanged.Pakistan keeps it (source) for the country they asked for.

करो (या मरो!) — do or die.انقلاب (زندہ باد!) — long live the revolution.दिल्ली (चलो!) — on to Delhi.And two and a half million sign up for the King.

Eighth of August, forty-two (source). Bombay. Do or die.By the next morning the whole leadership's in prison.By forty-five, two and a half million Indians in the King's uniform, every one a volunteer (source),the biggest volunteer army the world has ever seen, and Punjab in khaki again.

In Singapore, Bose (source) takes over an army made of prisoners, Indians Japan took from Britain.On to Delhi. Indians in both uniforms, shooting at each other in Burma.Forty-three, Bengal starves (source). Maybe three million. The war gets fed first.

And when it's over, the British put three of Bose's officers on trial in the Red Fort (source) —a Hindu, a Muslim and a Sikh in the same dock —and the whole country's on their side.

करो (या मरो!) — do or die.انقلاب (زندہ باد!) — long live the revolution.दिल्ली (चलो!) — on to Delhi.پاکستان (زندہ باد!) — long live Pakistan.And two and a half million sign up for the King.

(करो या मरो! انقلاب زندہ باد! दिल्ली चलो! پاکستان زندہ باد!)

The fifteenth of August, nineteen forty-seven, is two years away.

Eighth of July, forty-seven. Monsoon heat. A London barrister (source) lands in Delhiwho has never once been to India,and they give him five weeks, the census from forty-one (source), and maps that are out of date.Four judges (source), two from each side, and they split two and two,so it comes down to him: one man, one room, a fan, a map and a pen.

He cuts the Punjab tehsil by tehsil (source), from the numbers, not the ground.Every ਪਿੰਡ, every پنڈ, a sum: how many of these in a hundred, how many of those.In Jalandhar, forty-five in every hundred (source) are Muslim, and Jalandhar goes to India.He's done by the twelfth of August. The envelope waits in a drawerwhile two countries throw a party.Fourteenth, Pakistan (source). Fifteenth, India.Flags go up in towns that don't know which country they're in.Seventeenth, it's in the papers.

ਲਕੀਰ — لکیر — a line.One on the map. One on your palm.One made of people, walking, as far as you can see.Who was holding the pen?

Now it's you. Jalandhar. Your street's in India and your name isn't.You lock the door and you keep the key — ਚਾਬੀ, چابی — iron, the length of your finger.Gold in the hem of your mother's kameez. Rotis in a cloth. The pot still on the fire.You join the ਕਾਫ਼ਲਾ, the قافلہ, a road made of people,more than a hundred thousand of them, walking west with everything on their heads.The boundary force (source) they sent to keep the peace is gone by the first of September.A train pulls into Lahore and nobody gets off.A train pulls into Amritsar and nobody gets off.On the other side of the road, going east, another ਕਾਫ਼ਲਾ —Sikh and Hindu, same bundles, same dust, same keys in their pockets.Nobody on either side looks up.Then the rain comes all at once, the rivers come up over the fields,and you cross the Sutlej anyway, up to your chest, with the key held over your head.

ਲਕੀਰ — لکیر — a line.One on the map. One on your palm.One made of people, walking, as far as you can see.Who was holding the pen?

Nineteen fifty-one (source). Both countries take a census,and they count everybody who made it: fourteen and a half million, moved.Nobody counted the ones who didn't.The lowest guess and the highest guess (source) are nearly two million apart.A census only counts the people it can find.

So no number. Just a door in Jalandhar — ਘਰ, گھر — that somebody else lives behind,and a key that still fits it, on the wrong side of the line.

And the man with the pen burns his papers (source) before he flies home.Turns down the fee. Never goes back.

ਲਕੀਰ — لکیر — a line.One on the map. One on your palm.One made of people, walking both ways, as far as you can see.Who was holding the pen?

A village with a number. A square. A door with no lock.On the wall by the door, in chalk, in Gurmukhi (source):ਮੰਗਲਵਾਰ। ਰਾਤ ਦੇ ਦੋ ਵਜੇ। ਤਿੰਨ ਘੰਟੇ। ਸੌਣਾ ਨਹੀਂ।Your language. The letters run the other way (source).Tuesday, two in the morning, the water comesand reads it to you.

ਸੌਂ ਜਾ ਮੇਰੇ ਚੰਨਾ, ਸੌਂ ਜਾ।Sleep, my moon. Sleep.They're coming in the morning with a list,and your name isn't on it.

December, forty-nine. Fog in the fields up to the knee.Two years ago a man took me out of a column on a road,and his mother gave me a new name. I answer to it now.I have a boy. He's one and a half.He has his father's ears and my mother's temper.Every night I sing him the song my mother sang to me,and nobody on this side needs it translated.

سوں جا میرے چنّا، سوں جا۔Sleep, my moon. Sleep.They're coming in the morning with a list,and your name isn't on it.

India and Pakistan agree on almost nothing. They agree on this (source):find the women and send them back to where the census says they belong.In Delhi the Act goes through (source) a month before the Constitution.An assistant sub-inspector (source) can walk into any house without a warrantand take a woman to a camp. A tribunal decides. The tribunal's word is final.No court is allowed to look at it.In the camps, some of the women stop eating (source).The woman they put in charge of it (source) quit in the summer, and said out loudthe women had been reduced to goods and chattel.At home, they've already mourned me.

ਸੌਂ ਜਾ ਮੇਰੇ ਚੰਨਾ, ਸੌਂ ਜਾ।Sleep, my moon. Sleep.They're coming in the morning with a list,and your name isn't on it.

The officer writes down my father's name, my village, and what I was before.He doesn't write down my son.The jeep comes out of the fog at first light.His grandmother holds him at the door, and I sing it one more time.

Twenty-first of July, nineteen fifty-two.Transferred to date (source): eight thousand two hundred and six women.One hundred and two children.The Act is renewed until nineteen fifty-seven.

سوں جا میرے چنّا، سوں جا۔Sleep, my moon. Sleep.They're coming in the morning with a list.Your name isn't on it.Mine is.ਸੌਂ ਜਾ ਮੇਰੇ ਚੰਨਾ, ਸੌਂ—

Twenty-third of February, fifty-two. Curfew on the city.The medical students build me in one night.At midnight an old man from Old Dhaka, Pearu Sardar (source), gives them the bricks,and by dawn I'm standing. শহীদ মিনার. A monument to last Thursday.

Four years before me, twenty-first of March, forty-eight, at the Race Course (source),the man who made the country (source) tells Dhaka, in English, the state language will be Urdu, and only Urdu,and anyone who says different is an enemy of Pakistan.More than half of Pakistan speaks Bangla (source). We have our own letters, অ আ ক খ,and nobody here needs Urdu to say মা.

Twentieth of February, fifty-two: Section 144 (source). No gatherings.Thursday, nine in the morning, the students gather at the university anyway.Tear gas at the gate. Then, by the Assembly, the police open fire.

রাষ্ট্রভাষা (বাংলা চাই!)রাষ্ট্রভাষা (বাংলা চাই!)সালাম, বরকত, রফিক, জব্বার —four names, in the language they were shot for.

Friday. The funeral procession on Nawabpur Road. They fire again.Shafiur Rahman. And a boy of nine called Ohiullah (source).Tuesday the twenty-sixth, the police and the army knock me down.In jail, a young teacher called Munier Chowdhury (source) writes a play about the dead.He calls it কবর. The Grave.Twenty-ninth of February, fifty-six (source), a date that only turns up once in four years,the constitution makes Bangla a state language, next to Urdu.And in sixty-three they build me again (source), bigger:a mother, bent over her sons.

রাষ্ট্রভাষা (বাংলা চাই!)রাষ্ট্রভাষা (বাংলা চাই!)সালাম, বরকত, রফিক, জব্বার —and since ninety-nine (source), the whole world keeps their day, for every mother tongue.

Every twenty-first, from midnight on, they walk to me barefoot with flowers (source).There's a smaller copy of me in east London (source), in a park named after a mankilled on his way home from work (source) in seventy-eight, for the colour of his skin.They walk to that one too.