Based on the narrative of Sarjit Singh Chowdhary, a Sikh soldier who helped Muslim refugees reach Pakistan.

“Are we really here?”

It seemed unbelievable. A solid week of hitching rides in bullock carts, broken-down Jeeps, even a boat or too. The number of times they’d lost hope, nearly escaped with their lives, the whole hullaballoo — it seemed nearly uncountable. But there it lay; the city of Karachi.

Of course, things couldn’t nearly be that simple.

The train was slow, chugging along at a steady pace beneath the clear night sky. The semblance of peace was uncanny, Sarjit considered, lying on his back in the topmost bunk. His world shook gently around him. These moments of peace were short-lived, and that made it all the more important to revel in the tranquility while it lasted.

Out of the corner of his eye, a star glinted brightly. Turning over towards the window to get a better look, he recognised the familiar pattern laid out in the stars. Al-jazwa. The giant. The name gently arose from his subconscious just for a moment, before he remembered the same pattern being pointed out to him by Paul in the bunkers at Baghdad. This time, he called it Orion, the hunter.

“Well, they’re really all the same stars in the sky. We have our own legends about a hunter in the sky, and you lot from Lahore will tell stories about al-jazwa, the great big giant in the sky. At the end of the day, it’s all the same, innit?” Paul had said. At the time, Sarjit had considered it to be an unusual amount of poignant wisdom coming from a man who barely spoke two words at a time.

It was amazing the kind of bond a Sikh man from Lahore and a Christian man from Cochin had formed over the course of the shared years enlisted and spent in Iraq. V.P. Paul was a quiet sort of chap, but there was something innately comforting about his presence. His calm demeanor always made you feel at ease, even during the most stressful of nights spent wondering whether their comrades would return from battle the next day. The war with the Iraqis had really done a number on them.

Yet, even Baghdad felt like a lifetime ago at this point. Despite this, he couldn’t help but recall the fateful night in June when the battered old wireless had finally managed to pick up a broadcast about India.

“kzk…krk… announced plans for the division of the Indian subcontinent…kzk…Lord Mountbatten has announced the formation of Pakistan…krk…a separate Muslim state…”

In that moment, Sarjit had felt a pang of fear that struck him far deeper than any battle he had been in. His expression was mirrored by the Sikhs surrounding him — the men who had grown up witnessing the worst of the Hindu-Muslim conflicts. They knew immediately what was to come, and they knew the bloodbath to follow would be far greater than anything they had witnessed at Iraq…

A sudden bump of the train shook Sarjit out of his daze. Taking a moment to gather himself, he realised he could vaguely hear shouting at a distant end of the train. He took a moment to smile bitterly before swinging himself off his bunk and heading towards the sound.

“…tere jaise Musalmaan ne mere behen ko maar daala, Yamuna mein phek diya, tujhe bhi nadi mein duba doo kya…”

It had taken a while for Sarjit to take back to Hindi after five years at Iraq spent speaking English exclusively. Although sometimes the meaning of the words wasn’t clear, the tone made its point. Someone like you killed someone I love, I’m going to exact my revenge on you, then someone’s going to exact their revenge for you on someone else, and it’s just going to go on and on and on and–

The soundtrack to everyone’s lives at this point. But Sarjit had taken an oath to protect, and he wasn’t going to stop now just because he wasn’t wearing his khaki anymore. As he strode along the corridors of the train with purpose, the voices grew louder, until he finally reached the source of the shouting.

What followed was a blur, just like every time. Fists were thrown, almost certainly, quite possibly some blood. Definitely his own, no-one else’s. He had taken an oath, after all. What mattered was that the teenage Muslim girl and her younger brother were safe and unharmed, and the potential violence had been stopped in its tracks. Acting with haste, he steered them away and led them towards his own compartment.

“You’re alone, aren’t you?” he said, in what he hoped was a vaguely comforting voice. The girl nodded.

“Amma bought us tickets,” whispered the girl, her face pale. The moonlight shining through was just enough to illuminate her face to the point where the fear was clearly visible. “She said Zaid and I had to go, don’t wait for her. Just leave.” It happened often enough. Parents packed off their children at the first opportunity they got. Sometimes, they’d have a relative or a friend of the family waiting for them — if they were lucky, of course. He’d met enough of them while searching for his family. Sometimes, it would just be the children and however many sikke the parents had managed to scrounge up at the last moment. Whatever the case, many often did not make it to their intended destination in one piece.

Until Sarjit had something to say about it, of course.

With his hand on the boy’s shoulder, he quickened his pace. The fear pumping through his heart, here in a train in his homeland, was somehow far greater than any level of terror he had faced while facing death in a foreign land.

Of course, back then, the radio broadcast had changed everything.

“Sir, with all due respect, I need to return, and I need to return now,” he had said with such finality in his voice that no one could have dared question him, having marched into the official command tent.

As these things often go, he faced a lot more than questioning. Ranging from cajoling (“come now, Chowdhary, be reasonable”) to attempts at authority assertion (“now you listen here, young lad, do you think you can come and go from a warzone as you like?”) escalating to the point of threats of a court martial, nothing threw him off. He knew what had to be done. He would have to return to Lahore, find his family, and protect them with all that he had to offer. This was not the time to be a puppet in the petty wars of the British. When he had enrolled for the National Cadet Corps at the age of 15, he dreamt of honour and glory. But now, all he could picture was his family; his mother, hair braided and framing her green salwar kameez, his younger sister, with that spark in her eyes that could never quite be dulled, and his father, with his fingers perpetually covered in ink from the printing press at work. His family, and the thought of losing them to the bloodshed that he knew was to come.

Lieutenant Colonel Wilson, of course, was relentless. Quite the no-nonsense leader, he had warmed to his battalion over time — not enough, however, to let one of their number leave “at the drop of a hat.” In his words, “For God’s sake, this is not the time for a sepoy mutiny while we’re fighting a war!”

A powerful statement, indeed, but it did nothing to deter Sarjit Singh Chowdhary — a man who would go to endless lengths for anything, if he cared enough. This was something that every Muslim man, woman, and child whom Sarjit had deemed under his protection while travelling learned. If he couldn’t look after his family, he’d make sure that those travelling without their family would have someone to look after them as well.

“We’re headed to Karachi,” he vaguely heard the boy murmur, once they had returned to the (relative) safety of Sarjit’s bunk. Hearing this, he knew what he had to do, of course. He took a few moments to rummage through his knapsack and pull out a little pamphlet with a map of north-west India that he’d picked up at New Delhi Railway Station. This specific train would terminate at Jodhpur, which of course, begged the question — what good was it for Zaid and his Meena to end their short journey hundreds of kilometres away from their destination?

Almost scared to admit it to himself, but these two children reminded him more about his own family than seemed possible. When he had finally returned home to Lahore in the October of that year, he heard the same story from all the neighbours. Yes, no-one had seen his parents or his sister for weeks, nobody knew where they’d disappeared to either, and could he please not stay outside for so long, it was too dangerous. Finally, it was old Prem-ji, who ran the tea shop over by Sukhdev Road, who managed to clue him in.

“They disappeared on a bus,” he had whispered, as if revealing some great secret. “Said they were headed to Ludhiana, before it was too late. Would have been around three months ago.” He shook his head suddenly, his ashen beard swaying gently. “Now get out! D’you want me to get beaten up? I’m running an honest business here! No one’s going to bother me if I sit here quietly, serving my tea.”

The trail had gone dead from there. Yet, Sarjit knew they were alive, and well, somewhere. It might take years of travelling all over north India, but he’d find them, if necessary. One day.

When the train stopped for brief refuel at a little village called Anandpur the next morning, Sarjit escorted the two children off as quickly as possible. Yes, admittedly, it was in the middle of nowhere, but it would still be safer than trying to protect them at a railway junction as big as Jodhpur. The first order of business would be to find a cart, or a bus.

As they left the station, Sarjit glanced at their faces occasionally. Not much had been said, yet Zaid and Meena seemed to have some sort of unquestionable trust for him — quite possibly stemming from the fact that he’d taken a few punches to save them.

Meena squeezed her brother’s hand encouragingly, which rumbled in a very comical manner. He giggled slightly, and Sarjit chuckled as well. “Chalo, then,” he said, gesturing towards a nearby dhaba.

To go into the full details of the adventure that followed would take Sarjit days and days to recount years later, in his Defence Colony home, surrounded by his three grandchildren. This was far from the only journey he had made while in search of his family, but it was the one that he could recall with complete accuracy, no matter out-of-reach his other memories seemed. Meena and Zaid, in his mind, were as young as the day he had finally arrived in Karachi with them, in that November of 1947.