The Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province had been through a brutal process of ethnic cleansing. - Tariq Ali

"The Pashtun tribesmen under Khurshid Anwar`s command halted after reaching Baramula, only an hour`s bus ride from Srinagar and refused to go any further. Here they embarked on a three-day binge, looting houses assaulting Muslims and Hindus alike, raping men and women and stealing money from Kashmir treasury. The local cinema was transformed into a rape centre. A group of Pashtuns invaded St Joseph's convent, where they raped and killed four nuns, including the mother superior and shot dead a European couple sheltering there. News of the atrocities spread, turning a large numbers of Kashmiris against their would be liberators. When they finally reached Srinagar, the Pashtuns were so intent on pillaging the shops and bazaars that they overlooked the airport, already occupied by the Sikhs".

And then the burnt houses. How were they burned? I would ask the locals. Back would come a casual reply. 'They belonged to Hindus and Sikhs. Our fathers and uncles burnt them.' But why? 'So they could never come back, of course.' But why? 'Because we were now Pakistan. Their home was India.' But why, I persisted, when they had lived here for centuries, just like your families, spoken the same language, despite the different gods? The only reply was a sheepish grin and a shrugging of shoulders. It was strange to think that Hindus and Sikhs had been here, had been killed in the villages below. In these idyllic surroundings, the killings and burnings seemed strangely abstract to our young minds. We knew, but could not fully understand, and therefore did not dwell on these awful events till much later

For my parents, most of whose friends suddenly vanished, Lahore in the fifties was like a ghost town. The pain of Partition has been sensitively depicted in a number of short stories by the Urdu writer, Saadat Hasan Manto, and by poets like Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Sahir Ludhianvi. I had been three and a half years old in 1947. Pre-Partition Lahore, for me, existed only in numerous overheard conversations. The recent past became a subject for discussions, sometimes heated, but more often sad, and these could be heard in every quarter of the city. They frequently centred on the vibrancy of the town. During the twenties, thirties and forties, it had been an important cultural centre, a home for poets and painters, a city that was proud of its cosmopolitanism. Nineteen forty-seven had changed all that for ever. The old coffee houses and teashops were still in place, but the Hindu and Sikh faces had disappeared, never to return. This fact was soon accepted; political gossip and poetry reasserted their old primacy under new conditions.