Two or three years after Partition, it occurred to the governments of Pakistan and India that, just like ordinary prisoners, the lunatics should be exchanged too: the Muslim lunatics in India’s asylums should be sent over to Pakistan, and the Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan’s asylums handed over to India.
Whether this was sensible or senseless, nobody knows. In any case, as the wise men had decided, high-level conferences were held on both sides, and at last a day was fixed for the exchange of lunatics. Careful screening was done. Those Muslim lunatics whose relatives were still in India were left where they were. The rest were sent off to the border. Here in Pakistan, since nearly all the Hindus and Sikhs had already gone, the question of keeping anyone never came up. Every last Hindu and Sikh lunatic was taken to the border under police guard.
What happened on the other side, nobody knows. But here, when news of the exchange reached the Lahore asylum, some very interesting talk got going. One Muslim lunatic had read the Zamindar every day, without fail, for twelve years. When a friend asked him, “Maulvi sahib! What is this Pakistan?” he thought long and hard and answered, “It’s a place in India where they make razors.” Hearing this, his friend was satisfied.
In the same way, one Sikh lunatic asked another Sikh lunatic, “Sardar ji, why are we being sent to India… we don’t even know the language there.”
The other smiled. “I know the language of those Hindustoras… Indians are real devils, strutting about all puffed up.”
One day, in the middle of his bath, a Muslim lunatic shouted “Long live Pakistan!” so loudly that he slipped on the floor, fell, and passed out.
There were some lunatics who were not lunatics at all. Most of these were murderers whose relatives had bribed the officials to get them sent to the asylum, so they would escape the hangman’s noose. These men understood a little of why India had been divided and what this Pakistan was. But they too were in the dark about the actual events. The newspapers told them nothing, and the guards on duty were illiterate and ignorant; nothing could be worked out from their talk either. All they knew was that there was a man called Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who was known as the Quaid-e-Azam. He had made a separate country for the Muslims, and its name was Pakistan… Where it was, where exactly it lay, of that they knew nothing. That is why, in the asylum, all the lunatics whose minds had not completely gone were stuck on the puzzle of whether they were in Pakistan or in India… If they were in India, then where was Pakistan? And if they were in Pakistan, how could it be that a little while ago, living right here, they had been in India?
One lunatic got so tangled up in the whirl of Pakistan and India, and India and Pakistan, that he went even madder. One day, while sweeping, he climbed a tree, sat on a branch, and made a speech for two hours straight on the delicate question of Pakistan and India. When the guards told him to come down, he climbed higher. When they threatened him, he said, “I don’t want to live in India or in Pakistan… I’ll live in this tree.”
After a great deal of trouble, when his fit cooled down, he came down and went from one Hindu and Sikh friend to the next, hugging them and weeping. His heart was full at the thought that they would leave him and go off to India.
A radio engineer with an MSc, a Muslim, who kept completely apart from the other lunatics and spent the whole day pacing one particular path in the garden in silence, showed this change: he took off all his clothes, handed them to the head warder, and started wandering the whole garden stark naked.
A fat Muslim lunatic from Chiniot, who had once been an active worker for the Muslim League and used to bathe fifteen or sixteen times a day, gave up the habit all at once. His name was Muhammad Ali. So one day he announced in his enclosure that he was the Quaid-e-Azam, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Following his lead, a Sikh lunatic became Master Tara Singh. It nearly came to bloodshed in that enclosure, but both were declared dangerous lunatics and locked up separately.
There was a young Hindu lawyer from Lahore who had gone mad after failing in love. When he heard that Amritsar had gone to India, he was very upset. He had fallen in love with a Hindu girl from that city. Although she had turned the lawyer down, he had not forgotten her even in his madness. So he cursed all those Hindu and Muslim leaders who had got together and cut India into two pieces… His beloved had become Indian and he Pakistani.
When talk of the exchange began, several lunatics consoled the lawyer: he shouldn’t take it to heart, he would be sent to India. To that India where his beloved lived. But he didn’t want to leave Lahore, because he thought his practice wouldn’t do well in Amritsar.
In the European ward were the Anglo-Indian lunatics. When they learned that the English had set India free and left, it was a great shock to them. They would huddle in secret for hours, discussing the weighty question of what their standing in the asylum would be now. Would the European ward stay, or be done away with? Would there still be breakfast or not? Would they have to choke down bloody Indian chapatis instead of bread?
There was one Sikh who had been in the asylum for fifteen years. At all hours these strange words could be heard from his mouth: “Opar di gur gur di annexe di be-dhyana di mung di dal of di laltain.” He slept neither by day nor by night. The guards said that in the whole long fifteen years he had not slept for a single moment. He hadn’t even lain down. Though now and then he would lean against a wall.
From standing all the time his feet had swollen. His calves had swelled up too, but despite this physical pain he would not lie down to rest. Whenever there was talk in the asylum about India, Pakistan and the exchange of lunatics, he listened closely. If anyone asked him what he thought, he would answer with great seriousness, “Opar di gur gur di annexe di be-dhyana di mung di dal of di Pakistan government.”
But later, “of di Pakistan government” was replaced by “of di Toba Tek Singh government”, and he began asking the other lunatics where Toba Tek Singh was, the place he came from. But nobody knew whether it was in Pakistan or in India. Those who tried to tell him got caught in the same tangle themselves: Sialkot used to be in India, but now they say it’s in Pakistan; who knows whether Lahore, which is in Pakistan now, might go over to India tomorrow, or all of India might become Pakistan. And who could put a hand on his heart and swear that India and Pakistan wouldn’t both vanish altogether one day?
This Sikh lunatic’s hair had thinned until very little was left. Since he rarely bathed, his beard and the hair on his head had matted together, which gave him a truly frightening look. But the man was harmless. In fifteen years he had never once fought or quarrelled with anyone. The older staff of the asylum knew this much about him: he had owned several pieces of land in Toba Tek Singh. He was a well-off landowner when suddenly his mind turned upside down.
His relatives had brought him bound in thick iron chains and had him admitted to the asylum. Once a month these people came to visit, asked after him, and left. This went on for a long while. But when the Pakistan-India trouble started, their visits stopped.
His name was Bishan Singh, but people called him Toba Tek Singh. He had no idea at all what day it was, what month, or how many years had gone by. But every month, when his family came to see him, he knew it on his own. So he would tell the head warder that his visit was coming. That day he bathed properly, scrubbed his body well with soap, oiled and combed his hair, had his own clothes brought out, the ones he never wore, and put them on, and went to his visitors dressed up like that. If they asked him anything he stayed silent, or now and then said, “Opar di gur gur di annexe di be-dhyana di mung di dal of di laltain.”
He had a daughter who, growing a finger’s width every month, had become a young woman in those fifteen years. Bishan Singh didn’t recognise her at all. When she was a little girl she cried at the sight of her father; grown up, the tears still ran from her eyes.
When the business of Pakistan and India began, he started asking the other lunatics where Toba Tek Singh was. When no satisfying answer came, his digging grew day by day. Now the visits had stopped coming too. Before, he used to know on his own that his visitors were on their way, but now it was as if the voice in his heart that used to tell him they were coming had fallen silent too.
He badly wanted those people to come, the ones who showed him sympathy and brought him fruit, sweets and clothes. If he asked them where Toba Tek Singh was, they would surely tell him whether it was in Pakistan or in India, because he believed they came from Toba Tek Singh itself, where his lands were.
There was also a lunatic in the asylum who called himself God. When Bishan Singh asked him one day whether Toba Tek Singh was in Pakistan or in India, he laughed out loud, as was his habit, and said, “It’s in neither Pakistan nor India. Because We haven’t given the order yet.”
Bishan Singh pleaded with this God many times to give the order so the whole mess would be over, but he was very busy, because he had countless other orders to give. One day, fed up, Bishan Singh let fly at him: “Opar di gur gur di annexe di be-dhyana di mung di dal of Wahe Guru ji da Khalsa and Wahe Guru ji ki fateh… jo bole so nihal, Sat Sri Akal.”
What he probably meant was: you’re the Muslims’ God… if you were the Sikhs’ God, you’d surely have listened to me.
A few days before the exchange, a Muslim from Toba Tek Singh who was a friend of his came to visit. He had never come before. When Bishan Singh saw him he stepped aside and started to go back, but the guards stopped him. “He’s come to see you… it’s your friend Fazal Din.”
Bishan Singh gave Fazal Din one look and began muttering something. Fazal Din stepped forward and put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ve been meaning to come and see you for a long time, but I never got the chance… All your people got safely away to India… I helped as much as I could… Your daughter Roop Kaur…” He stopped in the middle of what he was saying. Bishan Singh seemed to be trying to remember something. “Daughter Roop Kaur!” Haltingly, Fazal Din said, “Yes… she… she’s fine too… She went with them.”
Bishan Singh stayed silent. Fazal Din began, “They asked me to keep checking on how you were… Now I hear you’re going to India… Give my salaam to brother Balbir Singh and brother Wadhawa Singh… and to sister Amrit Kaur too… Tell brother Balbir that Fazal Din is well and happy… Of the two brown buffaloes they left behind, one has had a male calf… and the other had a female, but it died at six days old… and… tell them whatever I can do for them, I’m always ready… And I’ve brought you a few marundas.”
Bishan Singh took the bundle of marundas and handed it to the guard standing nearby, and asked Fazal Din, “Where is Toba Tek Singh?” Fazal Din said, a little surprised, “Where is it… it’s where it always was.” Bishan Singh asked again, “In Pakistan or in India?”
“In India… no, no, in Pakistan.” Fazal Din got flustered.
Bishan Singh walked off muttering, “Opar di gur gur di annexe di be-dhyana di mung di dal of Pakistan and Hindustan of di dur fitte munh.”
Preparations for the exchange were complete. The lists of lunatics coming from this side to that and from that side to this had arrived, and the day of the exchange had been fixed. It was the depths of winter when the lorries full of Hindu and Sikh lunatics set out from the Lahore asylum with a police escort. The officers in charge went along too. At the Wagah border the superintendents of the two sides met, and once the preliminary paperwork was done, the exchange began, and it went on all night.
Getting the lunatics out of the lorries and handing them over to the other officers was hard work. Some wouldn’t come out at all. Those who agreed to come out were hard to manage, because they ran off in every direction; the naked ones had clothes put on them and tore them off their bodies. One is spewing abuse. One is singing. They’re fighting and squabbling with each other. Crying, wailing. You couldn’t hear a word. The din of the mad women was something else again, and the cold was so bitter that teeth were chattering.
Most of the lunatics were against the exchange, because they couldn’t understand where they were being uprooted from their place and thrown. The few who could think a little were shouting “Long live Pakistan” and “Death to Pakistan”. Two or three times a riot was narrowly avoided, because some of the Muslims and Sikhs flew into a rage at hearing the slogans.
When Bishan Singh’s turn came and the officer in charge on the far side of Wagah began entering his name in the register, he asked, “Where is Toba Tek Singh… in Pakistan or in India?”
The officer laughed. “In Pakistan.”
Hearing this, Bishan Singh jumped aside and ran back to his remaining companions.
The Pakistani guards caught him and started taking him to the other side, but he refused to walk. “Toba Tek Singh is here…” And he began shouting at the top of his voice, “Opar di gur gur di annexe di be-dhyana di mung di dal of Toba Tek Singh and Pakistan.”
They did their best to reason with him: look, Toba Tek Singh has gone to India now… and if it hasn’t gone, it’ll be sent there right away. But he wouldn’t have it. When they tried to force him across, he planted himself on his swollen legs at a spot in the middle, in such a way that it seemed no power could move him from there now.
Since the man was harmless, no more force was used on him. He was left standing there, and the rest of the exchange went on.
Just before sunrise, a scream that split the sky tore from the throat of Bishan Singh, who had stood silent and still. Officers came running from both sides and saw that the man who had stood on his legs day and night for fifteen years was lying face down. On that side, behind barbed wire, was India… on this side, behind the same kind of wire, Pakistan. In between, on that piece of ground which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.