Abid Hasan Minto, one of the lawyers who had represented the hijackers in court, is now in his nineties. I was refused an interview with him on account of his age, but his son shared Hashim Qureshi’s number with me.

Hashim, now 68, responded almost immediately to my WhatsApp message. He refused to give me an interview but shared two books and a pamphlet. He was the author of one of the books, Kashmir: Afsha-i-Haq, and the pamphlet titled Shaheed-e-Azam Mohammad Maqbool Butt aur Ganga Hijacking. The other book was titled Deewano pe Kya Guzra and its author was one Mohammad Syed Asad. ^[1] Hashim said I would find all the answers I need in this material.

I knew that my grandfather felt strongly for his birthplace. In 2006, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, chairman of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, and Yasin Malik of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front were in Karachi to attend the World Social Forum. I was a student at the time, and considered myself a budding activist and Leftist. I’d gone up to them after their speeches and announced proudly that I am half Kashmiri.

When I recounted this to Nana Abu, he grew agitated. “There is no such thing as half a Kashmiri. You’re a full-blooded Kashmiri. Your father might be a Mohajir, ^[3] but you’re a Kashmiri.”

When Yasin Malik was sentenced to life imprisonment by an Indian court earlier this year, I had called Nana Abu to inform him. The news upset him, and he said he didn’t want to talk about it. Now, I probed Nanu Abu further to put his emotional responses in perspective. I felt like the answers would not be able to skirt around his own, indirect role in the hijacking of Ganga.

I asked him to take it from the top.

Back in Kashmir, his account began, his family lived in a neighbourhood called Butt Mohallah close to Srinagar. In the city, they used to carry out “ruffle ka kaam”—quilt-making—and “rangai ka kaam”—cloth dyeing.

After Nana Abu’s grandfather passed away, his father and his brothers moved to Amritsar. Soon after the move, his father was phased out by his siblings and had to start his own business from scratch. He got married to a woman named Sughra. Nana Abu was born to them in 1940.

Nanu Abu had fond memories of life in Amritsar until Partition changed everything. He remembered the fear and urgency with which his family had to pack up everything and cross over to Pakistan. When they were attacked by a mob on the train to Pakistan, Nanu Abu’s father had to conceal his 12-month-old daughter, Nanu Abu’s sister, in a basket of fruit.

His feelings for Kashmir grew stronger as he grew older, he told me. His blood boiled when he read the news, and got updates from friends and family in Kashmir. He claimed that he even crossed the border and returned a few times. He didn’t answer my questions about how he did this, and I’ve been unable to confirm how or whether it was possible for him.

When I felt we were warmed up enough, I dropped the question about the part that made me feel like my family had lived out history as if it were an action movie. 

“What was your role in the 1971 hijacking, Nana Abu?”

According to Nana Abu and Hashim Qureshi’s pamphlets, Maqbool had been involved with politics and activism since his student days in the late 1950s. After escaping to Pakistan, he had started studying for a Master’s in Urdu Literature at Peshawar University. He also wrote for Anjaam, a local newspaper. In 1961, he contested and won a local election in Peshawar, from a seat reserved for the Kashmiri diaspora.

Even as all this was going on, he was involved with the separatist movement in Kashmir. He became the publicity secretary of the Azad Kashmir Plebiscite Front. Some newspaper sources suggest that he wanted to set up an armed wing, but got no support for it. Eventually, along with like-minded colleagues like Amanullah Khan, Maqbool formed a sub-group called the National Liberation Front in 1965.

The next year, he was arrested for militant activities. In the popular imagination on both sides of the border, militancy in Kashmir—as we know it today—began to become a serious problem only after 1987, following the infamous “rigged” election that brought the National Conference-Indian National Congress alliance to power despite popular support for the Islamic parties. But the coexistence of democratic solutions with radical, even violent politics and dissent, has been a feature of Kashmiri politics from the start.

A Srinagar court sentenced Maqbool to death in 1968. But he managed to escape and make his way back to Pakistan. That’s when he became a regular at the chai stall under the peepal tree. In the early 1970s, Maqbool approached Nana Abu for help. He was raising money to help their people back home, he said. Nana Abu, impressed by Maqbool’s work, wanted to contribute. He even introduced Maqbool to other Kashmiri businessmen, who also started donating money.

Nana Abu told me that he didn’t know what Maqbool did with the PKR 1000 he gave every month. He never felt it necessary to ask. PKR 1000 was a princely sum at the time, and it left me wondering how Nana Abu was providing for his family. Was he giving money to his wife? Were they suffering already because of his decisions?

In January 1971, Maqbool told Nana Abu and a few others that he was planning to draw attention to the Kashmir cause by doing something drastic. He had dropped a hint about being inspired by how Leila Khaled, member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, had hijacked planes to highlight the Palestinian cause in 1969 and 1970.

Not long after, he laid out his plan. He had found two boys who he would train to hijack an Indian plane in Srinagar and bring it to Lahore. Nana Abu told me he was upset when he heard this. While he agreed with Maqbool on most things, he could not bring himself on board with the idea of a hijacking. But Maqbool was adamant.

Nana Abu and his friends didn’t hear anything for a few days. Then, one day, word arrived that a hijacked plane would arrive soon in Lahore. Nana Abu and some other businessmen rushed to Lahore. They wanted to tell Maqbool to call the whole thing off. But the situation had spiralled by then. The media was in a frenzy and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the man who was rumoured to be the next prime minister, was also making his way to Lahore.

After the incident, Nana Abu said, he started to distance himself from Maqbool and the rest. ^[4] He returned to Pindi and laid low for a few days. A week from the day of the hijacking, he went to open his shop in Saddar. But the police showed up and arrested him and his brother Parvez.

Nana Abu was scared but didn’t want to show it. “I didn’t know where they were taking me or what would happen to me.” He ended up as a prisoner at the Shahi Qila in Lahore. I corroborated this from the Dawn archives. At least 150 Kashmiri men, from all over Pakistan, had been arrested in connection with the hijacking and had been taken in for questioning to the Shahi Qila.

So, I sought them out in Karachi, where I live. Ground zero for my search was Zaibunnisa Street, the location of once-thriving shops whose names still rolled off the tongue of those old enough to remember: Kashmir Corner, Kashmir Art Emporium, Bukhara Palace, Manchester House, Ilyas Carpets, Ahsan Faisal.

Ahsan Faisal is one of the only three Kashmiri stores that remain now. They deal in handmade wooden furniture with delicate Kashmiri carvings. The owner Mr. Faisal told me that his father had moved to Pakistan from Bangalore. “We used to sell carpets, shawls and furniture but over the years, this decreased,” he said. “Now it is next to impossible to bring anything here from Kashmir.”

As it is in India, but for different reasons, ‘Kashmiri’ is a loaded identity in Pakistan. Many families, I knew, dropped their distinctly Kashmiri last names once they crossed over. There were differences in how Kashmiris lived in the Punjab and Sindh provinces. For instance, Mr. Faisal told me that he doesn’t remember Kashmiri people in Karachi using the community name ‘Butt’ in their growing up years: that trend, he said, was confined to Lahore. ^[5]

“We stayed with the people we already knew or were related to,” Mr. Faisal said. “After Partition, most Kashmiris went into the carpet and shawl trade. Most of it is finished now. There are still some shops in Lahore and Karachi but very few.”

His children had no ties with Kashmir, Mr. Faisal said. “My father might have gone to visit a few times but it was really my grandfather who was from there.” He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten Kashmiri food. “It has been years. Liaquat Sahib of Kashmir Art Emporium had recommended Qadir, a wazwan, to us,” he reminisced. “It would take all day to cook a feast.”

Next, I hopped across the street to speak to Yasir Ilyas of Ilyas Carpet Industries. When I walked in, he was sitting with his brother. The two men reminded me a little of my Nana Abu: they were tall and broad, and there was something similar in their faces.

Yasir was older than Faisal and remembered much more. They were Amritsari Kashmiris, like the families of Nanu Abu and Nani. His family had moved from Kashmir to Amritsar in the 1920s. His maternal grandmother told him they had migrated because of the great qaht—drought—in Kashmir.

His parents and his father’s siblings decided to move to Pakistan around the time of Partition. “When Pakistan came into being, everything disintegrated,” he said. “My father and his five brothers were all in the carpet business. Three of them decided to set up shops in Karachi while two of them went abroad. One of my uncles is still running a carpet shop in Nairobi.”

When Ilyas’ family moved to Pakistan, they brought several carpets along. These carpets were eventually finished in Lahore. “The artisans were Mohajirs from places like Gwalior, Agra, Jaipur,” Ilyas said. “They came to us and said we know the work, just give us the design.”

The place where Ilyas Carpets is located used to be known as the garh—fortress—of Kashmiris, I learned. “Opposite our shop was Kashmir Corner, there was Manchester House, Bukhara Palace, Kashmir Art Emporium. In the 1960 and 1970s, we used to sell carpets by the hour to visitors from abroad. One of our salesmen, a man from Shimla, had them eating out of his hands!”

Kashmiris have always been more business-minded than other Pakistani communities, Ilyas believed. “They were special, smarter than the locals. They knew how to make money.” Qadir, the legendary wazwan, came up in my conversation with Ilyas, too. He was, it seems, the last in an illustrious line of cooks who knew every family in the community. “Our freezers used to be stocked with his food for weeks,” Ilyas said of one particular wazwan. “After he died, his shagird”––disciple—“Hassan took over and then there was Qadir. But now there is no one.”

Once, he said, he’d hit my mother playfully when Ama was a child. “Your Nani got very upset with me and asked me if she had ever hit me. I felt so ashamed. I apologised immediately.”

“We came from a privileged background, but the move to Amritsar had emptied our pockets,” Amjad Nana said. “Then came Partition. My father had to start all over again. He tried to make money as a contractor. He even made your Nana Abu’s Mohanpura house but it didn’t go well. When I was in my second year of college, your nani got very sick and I went to live with her.”

Those were the weeks of Nana Abu’s time in custody. No one knew if and when he’d be back. After Nani’s death, her parents and siblings wanted to spend time with her children. They were willing to take them in for good, and, or the very least, have them over for holidays. But Nana Abu refused. Over time, the relationship between the families soured further. Eventually, they stopped talking to each other. The next time Ama’s uncles saw her was at her engagement—15 years after Nani’s death.

When I asked Khalid, Nana Abu’s younger brother, about what happened in 1971, he repeated the words I was coming to be familiar with: he didn’t want to talk about that year. 

“Why are you getting into this?” he asked me. “Leave it alone. It is not going to change anything.”

Nana Abu’s involvement with the hijacking and with Maqbool may not have been that significant in the grand scheme of things, but it changed my family forever.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the day Nani died. No one in the family actually remembers the date. All they remember is that it was in December 1971. No one remembers her date of birth either. Ama doesn’t remember the ghusl. ^[6] It’s unlikely that she was allowed to go to the graveyard.

But there was one person who recalled something of that day: Zakia Nano, my step-nani. Nana Abu had remarried a few years after Nani’s death. Zakia Nano was a cousin of both Nana Abu and Nani.

Zakia Nano was a teenager when Nani died. She told me that Nani’s sister Shad had come to their house in Railway Lines and begged someone to go with her. The two women got a tonga and hurried to the house in Mohanpura. They managed to get a quick glimpse of Nani before Nana Abu’s father took the body to the graveyard.

No one I spoke to remembered where Nana Abu’s other relatives were. Zakia Nano said that Nana Abu’s father did not want anyone involved.

“We got there just in time,” she said. “Your Nana Abu’s father was not at home, he had gone to get the headstone made. We ran inside, saw the body, said a prayer for the dead and ran out before anyone could see us. We just wanted to see her face before they buried her.”

Nani was buried without her husband or children around her. I try to keep her alive in my heart but I fear that these memories are not enough. In June, I went to visit her grave in Pindi’s Ratta Amral graveyard. It was caked with layers of dust and grime, and looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in decades. To me, it seemed like she was just lying there, ignored, just as she had been when she was alive.

In a few years, her grave probably won’t even be there. The faded and crumbling headstone has already sunk into the earth. All that remains above ground is her name: Asmat Sultana.