The 90-year-old Khayal Bibi known among the women in Landikotal area of Khyber Agency as Hindustani (Indian) is nostalgic about her place of origin in Calcutta where before her marriage in the pre-partitioned India she used to live with her family in palatial life style.
Khyal Bibi, resident of Alamkhani area in Landikotal migrated from India along with her husband Akbar Shah, belonging to Khyber Agency in 1947 as they have tied the knot in 1937 in Calcutta city of India.
Narrating an interesting story about her background she said that her husband Akbar Shah abandoned his native Landikotal in search of livelihood and reached to Calcutta in India in 1932-33.
She added her landlord father named Suhbat came across Akbar Shah just by chance in Calcutta where he offered him a job on his forms knowing that he had migrated from the far-flung area of Khyber in Northern sub-continent.
Khyal Bibi said that she had only one elder sister, Tayyaba who was married to a rich man of the area by that time.
Recollecting her own marriage with a Pakhtun of Khyber Agency, she said that her father one day came and asked her that he wanted to give her hand in marriage to a Pakhtun who was stubborn yet devoted and hardworking.
Quoting her father, she said, “My father told me that he wished to marry me to Akbar Shah who was the caretaker of our form-houses.”
Like a typical eastern daughter, I have to remain silent to express my acceptance of the match. However, she added that their comfortable lives were disturbed by the partition of India as she had to migrate to Pakistan along with her husband.
In the meantime she said that she had given birth to several children who were also dislocated when the Indian sub-continent won freedom. The woman sighed saying that her father owned hundreds acres of land in Calcutta and she and her sister were his legal heirs.
Initially, even after partition my husband would travel between Calcutta and Peshawar to look after the properties and business of my father. Yet he was caught by the Indian police soon after the 1965 war and he remained in Indian prisons for five years and finally he returned to Pakistan in 1972.
She said that she would contact her family through letters via the post offices of Afghanistan as crossing over the Pak-Afghan border at Torkham was not a problem to post letters from Kabul for India to communicate with her only sister and know about her husband who was languishing in jail.
Since 1973 she added that she had lost contact with her sister and other family members. She added that the 1965 and 1971 wars between India and Pakistan shattered their lives for worst.
She disclosed that before the partition of India, her late father Suhbat had entrusted all the properties and lands to her name yet after migrating from India she did know what would have happened to her precious assets.
Khayal Bibi said to locate her family and sister, she tried several times from Islamabad for the Indian visa yet it was not granted to her.
I even tried from Afghanistan to travel to India but the officials did not provide her travel visa.
When asked whether she still wanted to travel to India, she in an angry tone of frustration said that now she would never go anywhere except the holy places in Saudi Arabia to perform Haj or Omra.
She said that in Calcutta their family was conservative and too much religious yet they were leading modest and lavish life in terms of riches and facilities.
Khayal Bibi is the family head of 25 persons in her family here in Landikotal. She had three sons and one among them had died while the rest of the family comprised of her two sons and their children.
Khayal Bibi in the area is known as Hindustani in her community in Landikotal as she was wedded from India to settle here after losing much in India due to wars between the neighbouring countries soon after both got independence from the British.
Expressing her love and patriotism for Pakistan, she asked the Indian and Pakistani governments to avoid wars and develop friendship to save human lives from separation, destruction, human and material losses.
Her grandsons including Yusaf and Khadim said that their grandma was, “extraordinary human being” and the centre of their joint family unit.
Despite the fact that elderly Hindustani spent more than five decades of her life in the Pakhtun heartlands, she is yet to be fluent in Pashto language as she is mixing Urdu, Pashto and Hindi while communicating with others.
