The Last Nail!

There was chaos all around. People were vacating their houses; streets were full of people & filled with blood. Some children were wandering on the streets looking for their parents who had either been killed or have been searching for a safer place for themselves & their families.

 

Firozpur had never looked like this earlier & never after that. Though Lord Mountbatten had announced division of India one hour back only, people already knew it so they had started moving to safer places.

 

The problem here was that nobody knew what a safer place was in this situation. No-one knew whom to trust, whom not to trust. Those who have been friends for years, living together, eating together were eyeing for blood of each other; nobody had witnessed this kind of massacre ever in their life as if people were under some kind of spell. Sikhs, Hindus were looking for Muslims & vice- versa. Even if they get a small child of other community, they were ready to put him under their sword.

 

Nobody was left in that carnage; mothers, sisters, daughters, young girls, old ladies, children everybody. Children saw their mother, sisters getting raped in front of them & either getting killed or committing suicide. Mad fellows were not satisfied even with that; after raping the ladies, they sometimes cut ladies’ body parts also.

 

It was a scene not to be seen ever in the history, it was a scene no one would want to get repeated, it was the time which would decide future of two nations.

 

Salma was also a witness of this insanity. She had been living in Firozpur where her father ran a small grocery store in the main market. Her father was assisted by her elder brother whereas she along with her elder sister helped her mother at home.

 

They were having a happy family life when all their dreams were broken apart like so many other families in the country by this partition. Overnight her father Jamaal Ahmed was given ultimatum by his community to either stay here & die or go with them to the newly born country i.e. Pakistan for their survival. Jamaal had been true loyalist of congress ever since his college days & had actively participated in revolutionary activities before setting up his small world after his children grew up. He refused to leave India ‘it is my mother, it’s my country; when I didn't deter in front of those firangis, why should I fear my own people’- He declared.

 

Jamaal Ahmed didn't go because his fate was here, on his birth soil. He knew whole & sole of local politics whether Hindu, Muslim or Sikh but he forgot one thing; it was not that people were bad at that time but the situations were bad. People had lost their sense, they had lost the difference between right & wrong, they had lost the difference between life & death and they had lost the difference between friend & enemy; the only difference that was known to people was based on religion.

 

Jamaal Ahmed was killed next evening while returning from the market, his house was ransacked by some of his so called closed ones, they looted the house, raped his wife & elder daughter while his son lost his life fighting for respect of his mother & sister. Salma witnessed all this from a keyhole of door in the storeroom in their backyard. She saw her mother & sister getting raped in front of her, she saw them getting torn part in pieces & she witnessed brutal killing of her only brother. Her eyes got stuck to that keyhole for an entire day, she didn't move from there, even when she was witnessing the cruel brutalities, even when she saw her mother taking her last breath & when she was the only witness of three dead bodies lying in her backyard.  She was also searched in the house as one of the murderers was her classmate in her higher secondary. She didn't move even then when that guy was standing close to her on the other side of the door.

 

She kept lying in that store for next two days. Sometimes she fell asleep but her sleep was broken by noise of mob searching for their next targets.

 

Few times some hooligan entered her house also & returned back after seeing three dead bodies. After two days when she came into some sense, when she started getting disgusted by the smell of dead bodies of her own people, when she felt an urge in her stomach to have something, she finally got past that keyhole & came in open under evening sunlight.

 

She was looking pale, her eyes frozen, her hair filled with flour (she was in the storeroom to take flour when hooligans entered her house) & her body still shivering from the trauma of the last two days. There was a killing silence in her house, sounds of some hooligans would appear now & then on the horizon and then slowly fade away. The bodies were literally mutilated & she had no power to go even nearby to them; she looked at them once & moved outside.

 

She was greeted by swords stained in red liquid doing rounds on the streets, she pulled herself back in to her house or else she would have just now added to the count in her backyard.

 

After an hour or so, when she made herself sure that nobody was there in the street she moved out. She heard some voices approaching her lane; she rushed to the nearby house of her aunt which was just few steps away but there also she was greeted by loads of blood on the doorstep itself. She couldn't muster courage to go inside being fully aware of what lies ahead. By that time those voices had come closer; she rushed towards a jeep kept in the corner of the lane & hid herself below it.

From the passage between the tires, she could see few steps moving away from her holding swords in their hands. She closed her eyes in terror & sat there like a statue without making any movement. Once again when the voices went down, she came out to look for some place to hide but in that amavasya also she had no place to hide.

 

The moment she came out, she was grabbed by a Sikh boy who was waiting for her to come out. He had seen her while going with his gang. He didn't make any noise in the group as he wanted to have her on his own, only for himself. He was wearing a saffron turban & his clothes were torn; his red sword giving witness of what it has gone through & his red eyes giving witness of what they had seen. Salma wanted to shout but words couldn't come as if they knew that there is no one who would listen to them. 

 

That boy had identified her by the amulet hanging to her neck. He picked her right hand & started pulling her with him. She resisted but the power of a seventeen year old girl who didn't have any food or water for two days had no match for a twenty two year old Punjabi wrestler. He dragged her on the street, making way among the dead bodies lying there.

 

She was being pulled in one direction & her breath was running away in another direction as if the moment this guy would attack her, she would leave her breath for ever to be with her mother & sister lying in her house. She was so tired that her body stopped responding after few steps as if that guy was pulling a dead body. When he couldn't pull her any further, he looked back at her; her face, eyes, neck, hands, legs, torn clothes, everything had one thing in common, red colour; the colour, which had become synonym of the independence of two countries.    

 

She had lost all hope of survival but that guy had not lost hope of what he had started for.

 

He took her in her arms; she didn't resist as if she was submitting herself in the arms of Yam raj. When he rushed with her in his arms, few men going in the group smiled at him & moved ahead as they had already had their share of enjoyment or cruelty whatever we may call it.

 

He took her to an old house which was at the end of the gully; door of the house was broken & stained in the blood. He went inside & dropped her on the floor. There was no body in the house except the silence which had spread itself to all nook & corners of the city. She knew this is going to be the final nail in her body.

 

When he was just about to touch her head, she immersed all her power & punched on his face.

 

‘Don’t come near to me or I’ll cut you into pieces’- She shouted while pointing the sharp edged dagger at him which she had snatched from his dagger case.

 

‘Don’t get me wrong sister, I've also lost two of my sisters while returning from Lahore. I don’t want this to happen to anybody else’s sister that’s why I brought you here. You go upstairs, one of my sister & her two friends are hiding there, don’t come out, Rab Rakha!!!’

 

Before she could understand what had happened just now, he shut the door and vanished from there to save sister of somebody else again.