Dhruv Pathak
By Dhruv Pathak
My grandfather (Dada) left Karachi for Amdavad by steamer in 1948, as Sindh’s Hindus were forced out of the new Pakistan in the months after Partition. I arrived two generations later, and an ocean away, so I never got to ask him anything. This letter imagines a boy who might have been: me, in Charlotte, in the winter of 1948, reading the papers and writing to stop him. The history in it is real. Only the boy is invented.
Charlotte, North Carolina–January 24, 1948
Dear Dada,
Your letter came on Thursday, and Papa read it to himself twice before letting me hear it. He said you were traveling from Karachi to Amdavad by boat because the trains aren’t safe. I looked it up in my school atlas and measured the distance with my thumb. I don’t think it’s even three hundred miles.
There used to be a train, the Sind Mail, that went right through Amdavad. You told me about it two years ago. Now the safest way is by water, and I don’t get how water became safer than land.
All we see here in America is the news, and it’s terrible. There were photos in LIFE magazine that Papa wouldn’t let me see, so I took them to my room after bedtime. People are being pulled off trains in Punjab, where Mummy is from. The paper says Hindu mobs and Muslim mobs, both, like it’s keeping score, like we’re all the same to them.
And I know about Karachi too, Dada. The paper said they killed Sikhs and Hindus near Ratan Talao this month, and Papa read it standing up, then went outside without his coat to smoke and stayed out for a while. But your letter said the camel carts still pass on Bunder Road in the morning, and Empress Market is still open. So maybe the city isn’t safe anymore. But your street is. Couldn’t you just stay on your street?
You’re already a big engineer. Everyone says so. You could find work anywhere, so why not in Karachi? They want you to design big houses and buildings in Gujarat, where Gandhiji is from, but Papa says the real reason is that you’re Hindu and Karachi isn’t yours anymore. Stay where everyone knows your name. What is so important about this private contract that Manjubaa has to pack my favorite place in the world into a trunk?
Papa keeps telling me all day that our family is Hindu. We’re Brahmins, but that doesn’t mean anything here in America. But you always said it’s fine to live next to Muslims. You told me to become friends with Ali. You said they are a good family. And when I left Karachi two years ago — remember? — Ali and I flew kites from his roof, and his mother fed me until I couldn’t move. You were so scared I was lost, but I just fell asleep on their floor. Is Ali supposed to be our enemy now?
My teacher, Mrs. Comer, told us that about a hundred years ago, Switzerland had a war between Catholics and Protestants. The next year, they wrote one constitution and became one country. That was a hundred winters ago, Dada, almost to this one. If the Swiss could do it, why can’t we? Papa used to tell me about an emperor, Akbar, who tried to bring the best of every religion together. Tarun uncle never stops talking about him like he’s talking about our future, not the past.
Now the newspaper says the United Nations voted to split Palestine in half too, just ten weeks after they split our Hindustan. Is that how things are done now? You cut a country loose like a kite string and just watch where the pieces drift? How can a line be an answer to anything?
Mrs. Sarkisian next door was a girl in Turkey when they came for her people, the Armenians, and she says it started the same way, with leaders deciding who belonged where. Why do they get to move our lives around like puppets?
Is this what Gandhiji starved himself for? He stopped eating for five days until people in Delhi promised to stop killing, and they say it worked. He’s an old man, Dada. How many more times can he do that? I would die if I couldn’t eat for five days.
Is this what they hanged Bhagat Singh for, so that seventeen years later we could draw the lines ourselves and do it worse than the British ever did? Mummy says Bhagat Singh wanted to bring everyone in India together after the British spent years pulling us apart. This feels like a trick. It feels like their last trick, and everyone is falling for it.
The newspapers here say it’s what everyone over there wants. I don’t believe them. Ali doesn’t want it. You said you don’t want it. That’s already two people.
We’re from Karachi. We’re from Mehran. Do they even know what they will call our home next? That’s ours, right, so why should we have to leave? I love how the walls and all the colors are so much brighter than in boring America. I love the sand at Clifton and the busy Empress Market. I love how everyone on our street knows you. Here, nobody knows us. Papa says they only let a hundred of us into this country each year, and the papers call every one of us a “Hindoo,” and Papa wasn’t even allowed to apply for citizenship until two years ago. When Papa meets another Indian at work, he brings him home for dinner as if he were a cousin. You have it good, Dada. You’re leaving to become nobodies like us.
And what is Amdavad, anyway?
We live in Charlotte, and it hardly ever snows here, so when everything iced over on Tuesday, the students and teachers all got scared and let us out early. That’s some good news, right? Papa says we always have to include some good news in every letter. I hope it’s at least warm when you get on the water.
Now, Dada, listen, here’s my plan, and I promise it’s a good one. Stay. Just stay. Keep your job, keep the house with Ali’s family down our street. When I’m eighteen, I’ll come live in Karachi with you and Baa. You can teach me the harbor again (I promise to listen this time), and I’ll teach you basketball, and we’ll wait until the two new countries get tired of being angry. I usually just get mad for a tiny bit, and then I feel better after five minutes. Sometimes I think I’m just hungry.
People are getting hurt every day, and I don’t understand why. But nothing has happened to you yet. Papa says ‘yet’ is a terrible word. Maybe he’s right. Maybe you, the boat, and the trunk are all right, and I’m just a kid with an atlas and a thumb.
So if you do get on that boat, look for the temple of Varun Dev as you pass Manora. Mummy says he is the God of the sea, Dada. Ask him to keep the water smooth for you. Ask him nicely. Papa says sometimes you forget to pray.
Or even better yet, stay home with Manjubaa. I think sometimes ‘yet’ can be a good word too.
Please be safe.
Please stay.
Om Namah Shivaya,
Taro,
Dhruv
P.S. If you see Ali before you go, ask him to write to me. I don’t know if letters can cross the new line, but mine crossed a whole ocean, so maybe.
Dada, you never got this letter. No boy in America could have sent it. You boarded the steamer. Manjubaa followed. Amdavad welcomed you, and in time your son carried his own trunk farther than you ever sailed, to Charlotte, where the boy finally arrived, decades late, still wanting to argue with you.
You were right to go. And every word of his plea is true. I don’t know how to hold both, so I hold them through the eyes of a boy who never existed, who cared nothing for history and only worried that his Dada might get hurt. He thought Karachi was the warm country and America the cold one, and he wasn’t wrong. I’ve felt that cold my whole life, the particular cold of being a stranger in the only country you have. You knew it too — you just knew it in Amdavad.
No one in our family ever said any of this out loud. So I made you a grandson who could. He isn’t real, Dada. The worry is.
Dhruv Pathak is a salesman and writer based in St. Louis, originally from Charlotte, NC. He writes to better understand people and contribute to our shared humanity. Contact: pathak.d@icloud.com.
