When 24-year old Aurangzeb Nabi Balloch and his crew of fishermen set sail from Karachi port in December last year, – for what was meant to be a regular fishing expedition on a cool winter day – they never imagined that their journey would last a grim seven months. The young five-man crew left only yesterday to return to their Sindhi homeland, having spent more than three traumatic months held hostage by Somali pirates, and their remaining time as guests in Mumbai’s Yellow Gate police station jail – the time it took for the Pakistani embassy in India to process the paperwork for their release.
When 80-year-old Sarla Kripalani heard that visitors from her pre-partition homeland in Sindh were in jail not far from her Mumbai residence, she felt ashamed. Six Indian sailors from the MV Suez had been rescued only this past weekend by the Pakistani Navy, and brought into Karachi to much fanfare and warmth. The Pakistani sailors – young Balloch’s crew – had been rescued, similarly, by the Indian Navy, but instead of the warm welcome, they were carried off to the Yellow Gate police station in Mumbai for ‘questioning.’ Why? Because, in typical bumble-headed bureaucratic thought, they were Pakistani and therefore suspect. Sarla Aunty decided to do some informal diplomacy by herself. Besides, she yearned to meet people from her homeland of Sindh, which she had not been to since her departure in 1963.
So she marched off with me, her 18-year-old niece in tow, and books and boxes full of traditional Sindhi sweet meats in one hand and a walking cane in the other, to make them feel more at home. It was the warmest of unions. The Pakistani fishermen spoke about their villages and towns while Sarla Aunty pin-pointed their locations on a mental map of her ancestral homeland. This was perhaps the closest she would get to a visit to Sindh, even some Sindhi and Urdu trickled into the conversations now and then. It would have been impossible to distinguish these young men from those on the streets of Mumbai, except for the fact that they had so much more in common with Sarla Aunty, and other Sindhi octogenarians, than any Mumbaikar.
The fishermen then shared their harrowing experience of surviving at gunpoint with Somali pirates: they were two kilometres off the coast of Pakistan when the Somalis seized their boat and stripped them of their possessions. For the following three months, they were kept in a small room and given a nauseating meal: rice to eat and rice-water polluted with diesel to drink. On 12 March, the Indian Navy came to their rescue when the boat was found 290 nautical miles from Lakshwadeep. Amidst an exchange of gunfire between the Indian Navy and the Somali pirates, the fishermen’s boat caught fire, forcing them to leap into the water, from where the Indian Navy finally saved them. After their rescue, the Somali pirates were put behind bars in Mumbai. This hellish experience has scarred the five young men deeply, and once home, none plan to go out to sea again.
But sometimes, even the deepest scars can fade, and even heal. They will never disappear, but it is possible to come to terms with them, to look at them without being overcome by pain. To that same end, my classmates and I had organized the ‘Remembering Partition’ event last year —to help my generation learn from the partition of India, to view it neutrally for a positive future, and to help the survivors of the partition reach closure. It engaged in discussion high school students from Islamabad and Mumbai, and both sides walked away with a fresh perspective of their neighbour. But the criticism was that it is easy to get the elite and educated to respect each other’s views and coexist peacefully, but not the layman.
Balloch’s five-man crew probably fall under the category of laymen. These five fishermen had all studied up till the 7th grade from an Urdu medium school, yet they are more inclined to a peaceful Indo-Pak future than any politician in either India or Pakistan currently seems to be. It is doubtful they would return to Karachi with a negative impression of India after the bonds they had built with everyone, from the ‘chai-walla’ who brought them their morning tea to Inspector Tope at Yellow Gate station who gave them free access to his personal cell phone to call their families, to an 80-year-old Partition refugee who conducted some informal diplomacy of her own, and quenched the thirst in her heart yearning for her homeland. The same holds true for the Indian hostages who had been taken to Pakistan after a Pakistani humanitarian paid the ransom asked, and the Pakistani Navy rescued them last weekend from Somali pirates.
People-to-people interaction makes a world of a difference, at each and every level of the social strata. While our governments bickered over the trivial matter of paying for the five hostages’ food and clothes, we exchanged numbers and addresses with our friends from Sindh at the Yellow Gate police station, with the hope that we would be able to visit them one day. Like the partition of India, a considerable part of the present India-Pakistan tensions can be credited to political gamesmanship, one that lacks the human touch that only personal and informal interactions can bring. Perhaps with more such interactions, Sarla Aunty, and several others like her, will be able to visit their homes in Sindh again, one day.
Ria Mirchandani is a student in Mumbai.
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