matches played before Independence were mostly communal games,
made of teams based on religious groups – where Hindus, Muslims
and Parsis played against each other. “Imagine on one hand, the
country was caught up in the growing demand for freedom, and on
the other we were playing communal gladiatorial matches, pitting
Muslims against Hindus.”
The communal games and Test cricket continued until 1946, after
which the creation of Pakistan became a political reality. For many
like Sharif, Partition offered up an incomprehensible future.
“Perhaps I was too young, but no one could have predicted the
turbulent months that followed Partition – the riots, violence and the
mayhem that was unleashed. Calcutta felt like hell’s playground on
earth. And there was so much anger and pain. So much was lost,
and so quickly. Some of us got to choose, and others had no choice.
When people first came here, we called them refugees, and now we
call them illegals. But a Bengali is a Bengali no matter where the line
is drawn. He was a Bengali when Pakistan was created and is still
one when it became Bangladesh.”
News travelled slowly in 1946. It had taken weeks before Sharif
heard about the riots that killed the last of his family, and the fire that
burned down his ancestral home. He has never returned to Noakhali,
and he couldn’t go if he wanted to; in 1951, the town was consumed
by the local river.
“There was too much blood for the earth to soak up, so the water
consumed it,” he says.
It took a long time for Sharif to come to terms with Partition, and
nothing marked a new country’s existence more decisively than India
and Pakistan playing each other in 1951, when the Pakistani team
toured Delhi, Bombay and Lucknow.
When India won the matches in Delhi and Bombay, Sharif
remembers spontaneous celebrations on the streets, as well as the
visceral and violent reaction in Lucknow when India lost. The sport
had become a battle between two nations who had just years ago
shared a common cricketing history and players – the wounds of
Partition had carried over to the game.
“Do you know that Pakistan’s first cricket team captain, Abdul
Hafeez Kardar, had played Test cricket for India first?” Sharif smiles.
Such were the irreconcilable ambiguities of life – “the Father of
Pakistani Cricket started his career playing for India. Imagine what he
must have felt? Only years ago, he had played for India, and now he
was back to a place he had once called home, to play against men he
had once played with on the same team.”
Like Kardar’s India, Sharif’s Noakhali is a mythical home, built
only on imagination. He remembers nothing about it. There are no
biographies of this destruction, it is a space emptied of its history.
What stories will Lefty, Dotty and the rest of them tell in the years to
come and where will their stories begin?
Along a border becoming ever more fortified, “it feels like Partition
is still alive,” says Sharif. “We pass its memory on from one generation
to another.”
DECEMBER 2016
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