1. Before the Border Was Drawn
Lahore remained the city of peace in the summer of 1947.
Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, walked on the same streets, under the same shade of
the trees, under the same smell of the monsoon-wet ground. It is in this
serenity that Zeenat, a young Muslim girl, whose laughter used to reverberate
in the inner courtyard of a haveli close to Mochi Gate lived. She was 17 years
old, lively and adventurous and even climbed up trees with bare feet in order
to pick the sweetest jamuns. The world was little, however, it sufficed. She
was married off by her family to Raghib, a reserved yet good natured clerk in
the city registrar. He was the kind of eyes, a poetry lover, and he once
strolled across the city merely to present her with a bunch of just picked
marigolds. Their nikkah was celebrated in July, in the golden sun, in the smell
of rose petals and the sound of gramophone music. Zeenat did not know much
about love, and she thought that love must have something to do with the way
Raghib was looking at her which was as though she were some story that he would
never wish to finish reading.
2. The Cracks in the Sky
Lahore was shivering. Rumors travel faster then trains.
British were going, India would be partitioned and no one had the slightest
idea what this partition meant. In one night, friends turned into strangers.
Hindu traders closed down the shops. Sikh neighbours took to Amritsar. The
streets which used to be crowded with children flying their kites were now
silent and full of slogans. It was one August morning, a few days after the
formation of Pakistan, that Raghib kissed Zeenat on the forehead and said that
he had to go--his older brother was stranded in Amritsar and he had to bring
him back across the border. Before the sun goes down, he vowed he would come.
Zeenat saw him in his white kurta go away, with only a cloth bag and a folded
paper, a letter or a map. And that was the end of him as far as she was
concerned.
3. A Letter With No Address
When Raghib didn’t return for two days, Zeenat grew anxious.
Her in-laws said the border was chaotic. Trains were being attacked. But they
reassured her—he was clever, he would find a way.
She waited each day, sitting by the wooden door that creaked
when the wind blew. On the third day, she picked up her pen. She didn’t know
where to send the letter, but she wrote anyway.
She folded it neatly, placed it in an envelope, and wrote
his name. No address. Just “Raghib, Amritsar.” She handed it to the postman who
shrugged but took it anyway.
4. Letters That Went Nowhere
Weeks passed. No news. No letters in return. Zeenat
continued to write.
One letter became two, then five, then ten. She wrote about
the changing city, about the bakery that had burned down, about her dreams
where he held her hand and said nothing but smiled. Her handwriting remained
steady, even when her voice began to break when she read them aloud to herself.
Eventually, the postman stopped accepting her envelopes.
“There’s no way to send these anymore, bibi,” he said. “The border is blood
now, not just ink.”
So she folded the letters and kept them in an old tin box,
beneath the trunk that held her bridal clothes. She still wore the red glass
bangles he had slipped onto her wrists on their wedding day.
5. Whispers of Death
One day, her uncle came rushing in, his clothes dusty, his
eyes red.
"A refugee train from India arrived this morning. Full
of corpses."
Zeenat felt her knees buckle. They were calling it the Ghost
Train—no survivors, only blood, and silence. She wanted to believe Raghib
wasn’t on it. That he had missed the train. That he was alive, searching for a
way back.
But the city had become numb to grief. Families buried
bodies without names. Mass graves swallowed stories no one would ever tell.
Zeenat remained silent. She didn't cry. She just added another letter to the
tin box.
6. The Bride Who Never Left
Zeenat did not remarry. There were offers, some sympathetic,
some desperate, but she never accepted. She claimed that she was already
married. Thenceforth she wore white, not as the widow, but as the woman, in
waiting. Her in laws later departed to Karachi. Zeenat remained back, in the
same house, looking after her old neighbor and teaching children Quran in the
evenings. Time crept on. The city was different. Pakistan was no longer an
idea. Streets were changed. The old sweet shop was replaced by a cinema. But
Zeenat haveli was the same, stuck in the past, as she was. She kept on writing
letters.
7. A Stranger at the Border
It was almost ten years later in 1956 that Zeenat heard a
knock at her door. A journalist was a young man of Delhi, who had come to
Pakistan as a member of a peace delegation. He carried a satchel of letters he
had gathered in refugee households in the hope that someone in Pakistan might
be able to get them back to their relatives. He wondered whether she was
Zeenat. The hands shook. Who came you? He drew a yellowed letter out of his
bag. It came, to her, of Raghib. “Zeenat, I got to Amritsar. But I was hurt. I
attempted to come back but they would not allow me to cross. My brother is
killed. I dream by night of Lahore, of our wedding, of you in that green dress
by the well. Whether this letter will reach you I know not. But in the
case--know that I never ceased writing to you. Always yours-R. She held the
paper to her breast and cried--not at the years she had lost, but at the letter
which had come at last.
8. Truth in Pieces
The journalist told what he knew. Raghib had lived, of
course. But in the riots he had lost a leg. He had sent many dozens of letters,
but at the camps they were seized, or lost in transit. In India, he had
remarried under the influence of his mother, who was getting old. He was a
father to a son. However, in all the letters that he sent to Zeenat, he
referred to her as his only wife. Zeenat heard and her eyes were dry now. What
she wanted to know she did not ask. This time she wrote one more letter. “My Raghib,
I saved all your letters, those I never got. I had your bangles on till they
broke. I reserved a corner of the bed to you each night. I am not mad. Love is
not being together, after all, but it is remembering without bitterness. This
letter may never reach you, that is all right. All I wanted to do was to say
good-bye. Your Zeenat.” She locked the tin box in which she placed the letter
with the others.
9. A Daughter’s Discovery
Years later, in 1995, a young girl called Amina, the
grandniece of Zeenat, fishes out the tin box when cleaning up the attic. At
that point Zeenat had died a natural death with only the word Sabr (patience)
written on her grave. Amina read all the letters loudly and her face was full
of tears. She could not imagine that such a love had been. Not flowers and
songs, but silence and survival that they loved. Of waiting in not knowing why.
Amina wrote the letters and announced them anonymously in a literary magazine.
Both sides of the border readers wrote in, some believing the story, others
labeling it as fiction. One letter however was an exception--it was sent by an
old fellow in Amritsar. I read the letters. I knew the writing. My name is
Raghib. And I know now--she never ceased waiting.”
10. A Love Immortal
Nobody can tell what became of Raghib. It has been said that
he died in the same year. Some claim that he went to Zeenat grave under a
different name. This much is known: Zeenat letters now sit in an archive in
Lahore, as part of a Partition Remembrance Project. They are read annually on
the 14th of August, in a softly lit candle light, in the presence of Muslims
and Hindus. In one of the most read letters there is the following line: There
is no such line that can separate a heart that remembers, even though the
border divides our land. And thus, in a world of reconstruction with barbed
wires and forgotten graves, the love of Zeenat and Raghib stands- a story of
unspoken letters, which survived the sound of war.
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