90-year young Reema crosses border to visit her Rawalpindi home
Excited, sad, elated and melancholic…
Wagah Attari Border: Reena Chhibber Varma’s milestone 90th birthday year (born in 1932) was a dream come true after 75 years, as she walked today across the Radcliff Line International Border between India-Pakistan, to fulfill her ardent desire to see her birthplace and childhood home in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, again.
Reena expressed herself on this momentous moment in her life -“I urge governments of both countries to ease visa restrictions to restart people-to-people contact between both countries, I ask citizens of both countries to “walk the present road to progress from the past of pain hand in hand”.
For Reena, it was her fourth try for a visa, that made this journey a reality. Reena who was in Amritsar for two days earlier, where she had stayed to complete her graduation in Modern College, post-partition, said “Amritsar too, is my home albeit for two years”.
From May to July of 1947, she and her family moved to India, when she was 15 years old. Communal riots started in February-March onwards in 1947. In the last 75 years of separation from her home in Pakistan, Reena says –“I couldn’t erase the memory of my ancestral home, my neighborhood, and my Pindi streets. It remained a constant tug to my heartstrings”.
The 90-year-old turned to social media during Covid times and expressed her desire to visit her ancestral home in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Pakistan’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Hina Rabbani Khar noticed her pleas as friends from networking sites tagged her urging the minister to intervene and grant visa to the nonagenarian. The Pakistan minister lost no time in issuing a 90-day multi-city visa to the former denizen of Rawalpindi.
Today while driving to the International border, a mere 30 minutes drive, Reena, carried mixed feelings, that oscillated every second, bringing sudden spurt of excitement of the present, then deep melancholy with her mind constantly wavering between the past and present in a range of 75 years of geographical birth of two nations. Reena waxed and waned by turns, reliving the moment when she was 15 years old. She felt saddened to remember her journey to Solan (India) never dreaming that there would be barriers that would close behind her and it would take 75 years for her to cross over manmade lines, to go back to her loving home. Her maternal home, made by and named after her father Bhai Prem Chand Chhibber -‘Prem Niwas, 1935’ in the ‘Prem Gali’ a lane named after her father, located on the ‘DAV College Road’ of Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
The former citizen of Rawalpindi reminisced about a composite cultural community thriving in Pindi before the partition. “My father was not only a progressive but a liberal-minded person. Often friends from varied communities, including Muslims visited home, it was the most natural, normal, and joyous occurrence in the home, which was quite frequent,” she said, remembering “Our house-help were also a diverse mix of people”.
She especially remembered her father and mother and said a little prayer for all her lost ancestors who shared every joy and sadness in that Pindi home and faced every challenge post partition together. “I am lucky; I, represent all of my family today. At least I am that one person from the Chhibber family who could see the Pindi home that my father built with all his toil and life’s savings”, she says, adding, “My Mother couldn’t come to terms with the fact that we shall never go back to Pindi and was continuously in a state of denial till her last breath. My father came with nothing to India even his ‘potli’ was stolen or snatched or left somewhere, he doesn’t remember as he crossed over in a daze thankful to be just alive; knowing that all the comforts he made for his family over years of planning were snatched in one moment, and everything changed overnight.”
In a mixed mood throughout the 25 Kms we covered from Amritsar city to the Attari-Wagah border, Reena would take a second to register any questions asked on the way and was at once excited and suddenly sad, remembering having lost all eight members of the family, who passed away, pining for this home in Pindi.
“Yet my father never blamed anyone, not the politicians or the people nor the communities, and remained neutral throughout. I remember my father having a beautiful soul, a true human with humanity as his religion, and I take after my father,” she said.
In a moment of elation, Reena thanked her Facebook friends, especially in Pakistan who brought her dreams to fruition and spread so much love crossing all boundaries; that men unthinkingly and egoistically, draw.
As Reena waved her frail hand — she waved in both directions as if it was goodbye for one and wave-out to her homecoming to the other, in opposite directions. and declared -“I am a ‘young 90-year-old girl’, and today I feel just like my 15 years old self when I first crossed the border to India, never to return to my home!” she raised her hands in a Balle-Balle, Punjabi style.
Finally headed home to Rawalpindi, Reena was garlanded and welcomed at the Wagah side of Pakistan by members of the India Pakistan Heritage Club – Imran William and Zahid, and others. She will stay three days in Lahore where as a teenager she used to shop in Anarkali Bazaar as an annual shopping trip in winter, while her summer vacations were spent in Muree –a hill station near Pindi in Pakistan for the first 14 years of her life. She is being hosted by the Government College University, Lahore Pakistan.
On 19th July 2022, Reena will head to her home address in Rawalpindi Pakistan.
Rashmi Talwar, an Independent writer, can be emailed at: [email protected]
