A 1947 Partition survivor remembers her father's sacrifice

“I was traumatized and used to get nightmares. Spirituality helped me free myself of this bondage [...] Today, I want to revisit Pakistan and see how it looks. I am not scared anymore,” says Sushila Kapur. 

Mrs. Kapur was born in Miyani Town, Sargodha District, Punjab in 1928. Her mother died when she was three, and her father was a timber merchant. When she was five she moved to Okara, where her father put her in school. She was always one of the brightest students in her class. “My father used to say we’ll send her abroad, her English is so good,” she shares. Mrs. Kapur fondly remembers their childhood house which had a big terrace where they would sleep. Often, they used the terrace to teach underprivileged children, through which Mrs. Kapur discovered her love for teaching. Later when she migrated during Partition, she taught at the refugee camps in Ferozepur District, Punjab, India. 

She fondly remembers a lake near her home that people frequented for evening walks. Recalling her childhood mischief, Mrs. Kapur would catch fireflies and beg her uncle to buy her potato puri from a shop in their neighborhood. As someone who had a natural instinct for leadership, she constantly took initiatives in school and college. In 1944, she became the secretary of the students’ congress in her college. “One day I saw Mahatma Gandhi, who had come to give a speech, and I told my father he is so thin!” she recalls.

In June 1947, Mrs. Kapur first read about Partition in the news. Her first memory of the violence of Partition is her father’s shop being set on fire in the middle of the day. “He did not shed a tear but he told us children that even if he has to become a beggar, he will make sure we get out of here safe,” she says. “I was scared when I realized it is happening. As young women, my sisters and I feared for ourselves.” They decided to take the train to India.

She describes the scene at the railway station: “Kids and young women were being [pushed] into the trains from the windows. People were being killed openly. There were guns everywhere.” Their train did not move for three days, and people in the trains starved. Finally they got on another train, guarded by British security forces, bound for Ferozepur.

At Ferozepur Mrs. Kapur and her sisters searched for their father. She received news of her father's death at the camp, after many days of his death. “My father was killed protecting young girls in the train. People told us that he was stabbed and [he stood] till his last breath to guard the gates of the train,” she painfully recalls. Mrs. Kapur describes the scene at Ferozepur as grotesque, with corpses covering the ground.

At the encouragement of her uncle, she started teaching at the refugee camp and soon she married. “I have never felt like home anywhere. My home is my children,” Mrs. Kapur says. She wants to now revisit Lahore to see her college and sports stadium, and she wonders how everything looks there now.