I’m loving memories of my Hero
A tribute to my nana, who I loved to the moon and back.
My Nana’s first and Pakistan’s first passport.
Roughly five months ago my hero left this world and moved on to his final destination. I miss him terribly every single day, so much so that my heart still aches from his absence.
A couple of weeks ago, we were cleaning out his stuff and we found his first passport. Which also happens to be the first Pakistani Passport. Will you believe me if I told you that it was issued in Dacca in 1947!? A little history - Nana’s father passed away a couple of months before he was born and so he was raised by a single parent. After struggling for 15 years in school and college due to Hindu-Muslim discrimination, he realised that Bihar wasn’t the best place to be living in for Muslims. While he had been thinking about this for years, he heard about Mohammad Ali Jinnah and his party - Muslim league which was fighting for a separate homeland.
At the meagre age of 15, he couldn’t contribute much to the party but had decided that if a separate homeland were ever to be made he would be the first person to drop everything and move to Pakistan. And so it happened, 2 years later in 1947.
Following is an excerpt from an interview I took of nana for a term paper that I wrote two years ago.
“Time went on, the option came – (because my institution was controlled by Delhi) any setup that was controlled by Delhi had the option: You want to stay in India or whether you want to go to Pakistan or If you want to go to Pakistan Provisionally, that is to go and come back in some time. But all of us said that we are going to Pakistan finally...”
He told his family that a ship was leaving for Karachi and he had to go. His family discouraged him and refused to go with him, hoping he wouldn’t go without them. Yet after a month of fighting with them he bought a ticket and landed in Karachi in September 1947.
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