Train to Pakistan
By Dr Akbar Ahmed
My first memory shaped me, continues to inform me and I share it with an entire subcontinent. A small boy in a crowded train compartment bathed in dim yellow light motionless at night stranded in the killing fields of the Punjab My parents were escaping with me from Delhi on the slow train in that hot summer and heading for Karachi to a new country and a new destiny My mother had insisted my father not take the previous train; her woman’s intuition was right – everyone on that train was slaughtered except, of course, the engine driver both sides were careful to let him live and I was not too young to feel the searing heat of the irrational hatred and anger around me and what it said of the desperate need to love and be loved And I am always that boy – slightly bewildered and lost but always wide-eyed with curiosity at the colors and peoples of the world passing around me and always hopeful because I know some higher power looks over me.
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