Author Bhawana Somaaya's Memoir 'Farewell To Karachi' Reflects On Family's Partition Trauma Amid Indo-Pak Tensions

On May 7, India launched ‘Operation Sindoor’ in response to the April 22 Pahalgam terrorist attack, targeting infrastructure of terrorist groups Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba at nine sites across the border. Pakistan retaliated with an aerial dogfight. The following day, as the first drone war between the two countries escalated, author-journalist Bhawana Somaaya and her family got on a con call. “We were to leave for London on May 9 and while we knew going away wouldn’t be a problem, it didn’t feel right to leave the country at such a time. So, though tickets and hotels were booked, we cancelled our family vacation,” she shares.

Indo-Pak conflicts are not new for the Padma Shri recipient who has grown up listening to the stories of the Partition and its aftermath from her family who lived through the horrors. “On June 6, 1948, a frenzied mob attacked my cousin, Indira ben’s Karachi home, dismantling furniture, grabbing cash and valuables, leaving two elderly ladies bruised and bleeding from having their jewellery pulled off. My aunt locked herself in the storeroom with her daughter, a hand clamped over a terrified Indira ben’s mouth to stifle her screams,” Bhawana recounts. By the time her cousin’s father, a doctor, and grandfather, an MLA, returned, the house was burning, the mob having set all the vehicles ablaze.

While the stories turned her blood cold, they remained just stories because unlike her older siblings, Bhawana and her sister Seema, who’s a year-and-six-months older, were born in independent India. Three months after the above-mentioned incident, on September 22, 1948, her parents, Vali ben and Madhavji, with five of their six children —Chandravali, Mahendra, Pravina, Prafulla and Sarla — fled Karachi in a steamer with 3,000 others, docking in Kutch two days later and moving onwards to Bhuj to set up a new home.

“It was only years later when, in response to my counsellor’s query ‘What’s your biggest fear?’, I hesitatingly confided that whenever I was travelling alone at night, I would subconsciously look for safe places where I could stay just in case I didn’t have a roof over my head. She told me that this was an extreme emotional reaction to being displaced. My parents had unconsciously passed their fear, pain and anxiety to me,” she reveals.

After this, there was a growing need to touch her roots. But when even the best-laid plans didn’t materialize, Bhawana decided, towards the end of 2023, to pen the Partition memoir, without visiting either Karachi or Kutch. She had written 19 books, but Farewell to Karachi was still a challenge because she had no road map or subtext, the events she was writing about had happened long before she was even born, many of the places and people unfamiliar to her.

Her eldest sister, before she slipped into dementia, had made a list of their ancestors for her brother and given Bhawana a copy. Another sister, Sarla, settled in Germany, whom she had been urging to write a book that began in Karachi in 1948 and ended in Berlin in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, had left her descriptions of their home in Karachi and Bhuj. “After Sarla ben’s demise, my nephew found sheets of paper filled with her handwriting under her mattress. A cousin, Kaushik, gave me a newspaper cutting of my grandfather who was among the first to take the steamer from Kutch to Karachi. Different family members, in different ways, through different decades, have contributed to the book, but the perspective is mine,” she avers.

Bhawana, a midnight’s child, was born in Mumbai, on September 6, 1955, a year after her eldest sister delivered her firstborn, Harshad. After seven children, her ageing parents couldn’t afford another baby and some kitchen remedies were tried to terminate this ‘shock’ pregnancy. “But I refused to give up,” she smiles.

The nurse was hesitant to break the news to her father that he had a sixth daughter. “When told, Bapuji handed her a Rs 5 note, a princely sum back then, and said, ‘My Lakshmi has arrived. She will hold our hands through our autumn years,’” she narrates.

Bhawana stood by her ageing parents right up to their final journey and remembers that through all their struggles, she never heard them argue or raise their voice even once. Today, she believes she was born not only to care for this stoic, old world, dignified couple, but also to chronicle their journey across two countries that has made everyone who’s read Farewell to Karachi cry. “That’s never happened before with any of my other books,” she admits.

Would she like to visit Karachi some day? “Maybe, after all, it’s not just a city, but a sibling I’ve never met. But for now, I’m happy India has sent out a strong message to the world: ‘Don’t mess with us or we will strike back.’ Families like ours have already lost so much because of the Partition.  We have to ensure our younger generation is safe, and stories like those in the book remain just that... stories,” she signs off.

Book: Farewell Karachi: A Partition Memoir

Author: Bhawana Somaaya

Publisher: Bloomsbury India

Pages: 180

Price: ₹ 349