A house on Temple Road: The Nanda family

My grandfather, along with his family comprised of three sons and the youngest daughters, moved from Lyallpur (in modern day Pakistan) to Lahore in the late 1910s and established a small shop dealing with hardware. By sheer dint of hard work and dedication from the three brothers, the small shop grew and soon they were amongst the leading traders of steel in Lahore.

But the real change in fortunes came during the second world war, when the business really flourished. The word amongst the other traders was that the three Nanda brothers didn’t even have time to count the money – they would distribute the profits by weighing it on a scale! While my children think this is refugee mythology – I trust it is true.

While the family lived in the city, my father, Lala Balmukand Murti Nanda, built a huge house on the prestigious Temple Road, right next to Regal Cinemas, for his six children – three sons and three daughters. My mother used to tell me that the house had at least 50 rooms, complete with a sprawling lawn and stables to house horses, cows and buffalos. We also had a number of rooms where groceries and other dry rations were stored– so much so that a thief, running from the police, hid in our basement and survived down there for a week before he was found! Recognizing his immense good fortune, my father took on the responsibility of running an orphanage, personally delivering meals every Monday.

In 1947, India’s independence and talk of partition was everywhere, but my family didn’t think it would affect us. So, as was the usual practice during the summer, we moved to Dalhousie in the hills to spend the holidays with my mother’s family while my father remained in Lahore. I was eight years old at the time. Little did we know then that it would be the last time we would see our home, Temple Road, and Lahore.

Once the riots began, my father was persuaded to send at least half a truck of our belongings to Delhi. Come Independence, my father shied us from Dalhousie, first to Kapurthala and later to Amritsar, while he continued to return to Lahore to see if he could save the books from his office well as the cash and gold in the house – without luck. On his fourth visit, he was shot at by one of our tenants. He was rescued by a different tenant and helped back across the border. He did not go back again.

My father bought a shop in Delhi, and we all relocated to Karol Bagh. Unfortunately, fortune did not favor him. In 1969 my father died, bereft, disillusioned, and broken, wondering how someone oceans away sealed the fate of millions with a careless line drawn on a map.

I went on to serve the Indian Army, retiring in 1991. In 2007, I found myself at La Guardia Airport in New York, waiting for a much delayed flight to Houston. My wife, Geeta, struck up a conversation with a fellow passenger, who said she was visiting from Lahore, Pakistan. My curiosity got the better of me, and I asked her where she lived. On Temple Road – in a house that had since been subdivided into many apartments, with new construction on the gardens and above where the stables used to be.