The story continues from the point
where Puro decides to not leave Rashid and stay with him in Lahore. Ramchand,
Trilok and Lajjo left for India, each with their own set of worries. Lajjo is
tense and fears whether Trilok’s family would accept her at all. After all,
they had not accepted their own daughter Puro for fear of social shame. Trilok
is worried about how he would fend for his family in a new place, whether he would
get a job and how he would deal with the expenses of setting up a new home.
Ramchand misses Puro and is silently upset with her decision to stay back.
Additionally, he also had to look for his lost family.
It is still not ‘happily ever
after’ for Puro and Rashid either. Rashid’s family refuse to accept Puro and
want her to go across the border since she is a Hindu. They feared the backlash
that the family would suffer if the communal elements caught on the fact.
Rashid tries to tell them that now that she is married to him, no one should
have any objection to her presence in Pakistan. Afterall she had a Muslim name
tattooed on her forearm. This somewhat convinces Rashid’s family and they
half-heartedly accept Puro.
In India, the devastated parents of
Puro and Trilok see how they lost their beloved daughter in the name of family
honour. They do not want to lose Lajjo. She is already traumatised by what she
has undergone in the days she had been abducted. The nightmares she gets do not
recede for weeks despite the care taken by Trilok and his parents.
Trilok and Ramchand now have houses
to live in—not ‘homes’ yet. They continue to look for Ramchand’s parents and
have visited nearly all refugee camps. Finally he comes across a woman shrunken
and delirious in the medical camp who somewhat looks like his mother. Not only
is it his mother, but his fears are confirmed that the communal violence and
the inhumanity have not spared senior women either. She had suffered the same
fate of gang rape as several other women at that time. Ramchand cannot bear to
see his mother in this condition. He wants to nurse her back to good health.
But the pain, suffering, humiliation has been so much that the mother chooses
to hang herself to death one day. Ramchand is a completely broken man. He has
no hope, no family, no love in his life. He is contemplating an extreme step
when Trilok and Lajjo bring a cause in his life again. They convince him into
looking for lost people and torn families and tend to the people whose wounds
run deep in their minds.
Across the border, Rashid does
everything in his might to buffer Puro from the communal hatred but she is not
completely insulated from the changed behaviour of the people around her. Riots
still have not completely stopped and survival is a challenge. The fear that
Rashid’s family has had, materialises before them when anti-social elements
want to ‘cleanse’ their neighbourhood of all Hindus. They knock at Rashid’s
door when he is away. Rashid had been able to quell arguments citing that Puro
was a part of the same society before Partition and that she is no foreigner.
Now that she was alone and vulnerable, the mob could get their way. Rashid
returns just in time to see Puro being dragged outside their home by the mob.
He rescues her from their clutches but cannot save her from the bullet fired by
one of the members of the mob. He lunges at the man with hatred and fury but
gets shot down as well.
Partition truly spared no one.
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