Partition

Born in 1941, Vinod was brought up and educated in Amritsar. He attended Government Medical College, and subsequently trained as a surgeon at PGI, Chandigarh. He left for USA in 1969, and retired in 2003 as Director of Critical Care Services at a teaching hospital in Michigan. Married with two grown sons, he continues to visit India at least once a year.

There was something quite intriguing about the two widows who lived on our street in Amritsar. No one symbolized it better than Channo's maan (mother). She was the mother of a girl, Channo, and four boys. I have little remembrance of Channo. In my childhood the ‘boys' were actually grown up men. I have dim recollection of them in 1947 when my father patronized a retinue of toughs to guard our house from attacks by marauding Muslims.

Satinder Mullick received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 1965 in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering, with a minor in Economics. He was Director of Economic Planning and Research for Corning Inc., where he worked on different consulting assignments for improving growth and profitability for 30 years. Later, he helped turn around Artistic Greetings (40% owned by American Greetings) and doubled the stock price in four years. He received Lybrand Silver Medal in 1971 from Institute of Management Accountants.

For the last 70 years, I have been trying to reconstruct what happened to our lives in 1947.

I was ten years old in 1947, and I remember the details of 1945-1947 very well. Like attending my uncle Lachman Chachaji's (uncle) wedding in Bannu, and sitting behind him on a horse in the summer of 1945. There were Pathans on dhol, and dancing in their Bannuwal style. Looked like if they had a drink. Then attending my sister's wedding in 1946 in Bannu during the summer vacations. The bridegroom had come from Karachi, but hailed from Dera-Ismail Khan.

Bannu was our ancestral home. Here we had a house built by my father Ram Narain Mullick, who was born in 1906.

Ram Narain Mullick. My father. 1906-1956.

Satinder Mullick received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 1965 in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering, with a minor in Economics. He was Director of Economic Planning and Research for Corning Inc., where he worked on different consulting assignments for improving growth and profitability for 30 years. Later, he helped turn around Artistic Greetings (40% owned by American Greetings) and doubled the stock price in four years. He received Lybrand Silver Medal in 1971 from Institute of Management Accountants.

Turbulent times have affected many all over the world. Having met some people from Europe and USA, I realized that some hard times are forcibly imposed, like Holocaust, and some were economically imposed like depression of 1930’s.

Upon reflection, I realized that my family, specially my father and mother, experienced the worst of times during the 1940's -first with World War II, and then with the political change in 1947.

In this article, I write about my school days in Lahore and Delhi, both of which were sweet and sour.

Dharampura

Satinder Mullick received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 1965 in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering, with a minor in Economics. He was Director of Economic Planning and Research for Corning Inc., where he worked on different consulting assignments for improving growth and profitability for 30 years. Later, he helped turn around Artistic Greetings (40% owned by American Greetings) and doubled the stock price in four years. He received Lybrand Silver Medal in 1971 from Institute of Management Accountants.

Dr. Manohar Lal Kapur lives in Virginia, USA. He grew up in Bannu, which became part of Pakistan in August 1947. He was 11 years old in April 1948 when he flew from Bannu in a small plane, operated by the Indian government with help from the Pakistan government, to Ambala in India.  His parents followed him later. Manohar's father was a gold jeweler in Bannu. His business was getting affected as Hindus and-Sikhs started to leave due to uncertainty about what the rulers of Pakistan would do.  His family liked Bannu but realized that their business in Bannu will decline drastically as their customers will not be there for too long.  They had to leave behind their gold jewelry assets as the Government planes did not allow them much to carry much.

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Manohar has told me that he saw no violence or heard about violence in Bannu when he lived there. I trust his memory. He has given me a lot of details about Bannu. He even revisited Bannu all by himself in 1991 for three days. On that visit, Manohar did not see people he knew except one.