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My grandmother was separated from her family during the Quetta earthquake of 1935. <story>
On 31st May 1935, a terrible earthquake hit the Baloch town of Quetta. Between 30,000 and 60,000 people died, including most of the family of my grandmother Rajkumari.
Due to the heat, my then 8-year old grandmother and her sister Duru had insisted on sleeping on the terrace with their father. This childish insistence saved them both.
When the earthquake struck, the rest of the family - her mother, grandparents and two other sisters were buried alive. Their father was badly injured but managed to pull out her sister Sursati (Saraswati) alive from the rubble.
He held the barely alive child in his arms, while the other two girls walked beside him as they searched for help in the extreme chaos. 8-year old Rajkumari had to go pee. Even amidst the chaos and tragedy, she had to find a private spot to do so.
When she returned she couldn't find her family. Dawn was breaking but she had no clue where she was or where their house was. The child wandered about, crying constantly, all day.
A little ethnographic break here. Rajkumari's family were Sindhi migrants in Balochistan. Her only language was Sindhi. Imagine how terrified a child would be at not being able to communicate with anyone in that milling crowd.
But that linguistic difference eventually saved her. She found a Sindhi family (or man - it's unclear who initially rescued her) who could understand her. The problem was, this family/man was visiting from Sindh.
They searched for several days, but the entire city was destroyed and the child was unable to give too much information about her family. They decided to take her to Sindh with them and come back to search later.
And just like that, she found a new family. This family had a large house next to the Indus River, and children of their own (I know of two older brothers, but there may have been more). By all accounts they loved her as their own, even spoiling her as the youngest of the family.
She had happy memories of this period - of escapades with her older brothers where they were the protagonists and she the loyal accomplice. The adoptive family continued her schooling and she matriculated from school, which was a huge deal in the 1940s.
Meanwhile every few years her adoptive father would go to Quetta and look for her family. On one of the trips (it's unclear when) he found them. Or her, to be more precise.
Only her sister Duru had made it alive from the earthquake. Her other sister had died the same night and her father perished later from his injuries (days? weeks? who knows). Duru was being raised by relatives.
She was reunited with her sister at some point, but continued living with her adoptive family. At around 18, she married my grandfather Nautan.
She had barely settled into her marital family when tragedy struck again. Partition.
Rajkumari's life was violently uprooted a second time in 12 years. She told stories of the fear and violence of Partition, but the family - infant child and all - made it safely to the other side.
The problem? Once again, she couldn't trace her (adoptive) family. Once in India, she would dispatch her husband to far-flung refugee camps whenever there was a rumour of her family being in one. It took her years, but she was finally able to make contact with them in the 50s.
There was one more wrinkle: some of her adoptive family had stayed back in Pakistan. While she regularly met one brother and maybe others, she never saw her adoptive parents again. Her oldest brother finally migrated to India only in the 1990s.
For anyone else, the twin tragedies of her childhood and youth may have crushed the spirit. But not Rajkumari. Till the day she died she was one of the most cheerful people I knew.
Her new family gave her the nickname Bhagya (Luck). They could have been talking of her luck in survival, or their own in finding her. <Fin>
