In a moment full of brotherly feelings
Two brothers..a Pakistani and an Indian meet after the partition of India in 1947
A moment of fraternal feelings between the two brothers.
From the source
Saka almost lost hope of finding his brother.
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Sadiq with his children and grandchildren heading towards his brother to hug him.
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Ska with his adoptive family.
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Two Indian brothers, Saka and Sadiq, separated during Pakistan's secession from India, but are finally reunited after 74 years.
Saka was six months old when the chaos of the partition of India occurred in 1947, their father was killed in the chaos, his mother later committed suicide, and his brother Sadiq, who was 10 at the time, narrowly made his way to Pakistan.
Child Ska was embraced by a Sikh family and brought up in their home.
In the years and decades that followed, Sca kept pleading with Muslims traveling to Pakistan to find his brother.
Others helped him write letters to the Delhi newspapers, and later he turned to the internet to find his brother Sadiq, with no luck until May 4, 2019.
Saka was tending animals in the Singh family's yard when Davinder, the grandson of the man who raised him in his home, rushed to tell him that Sadiq was about to be found. Ska remembers that moment. He's a farmer who doesn't have a phone, and he doesn't know the tech magic of the 21st century, where a village chief in Pakistan, or a doctor in Canada can appear fully on the phone screen to talk to someone else somewhere, When Ska sat under a jujube tree in 2019, he was looking at Davinder's smartphone. He didn't even know if Sadiq was really going to appear on the screen, but then the screen lit up to reveal an 83-year-old man that Ska recognized instantly. His brother he didn't know before. His mother committed suicide while he was still a child
None of the modern technical research tools existed when Ska was young.
He grew up in Fulwal, and hardly knows his family's background, but he was able to gather information from the villagers, through whom he learned that his mother had brought him to Fulwal to visit her family when the chaos of the partition broke out, and he separated spatially from his father, who died, and his brother who left for Pakistan.
According to Ska's knowledge, his desperate mother hanged herself, and her relatives fled Fulwal, leaving Ska with his destitute uncle, who was abandoned to be raised by Sikh Bagh Singh.
Bagh Singh sent the boy to work in his fields and tend his cows and goats.
It was hard and dirty work, says Sca. "I felt miserable, and I cried all the time."
"But Bagh Singh was able to take care of me," he adds.
Ska settled on the rhythms of farm life and the Singh family, and played with Bagh's son, Darshan.
Relations between landowners and workers can also be sensitive, says Jagsir Singh, a physician born in Fulwal.
"Plowing the earth together, eating meals together, is difficult to understand for people who are not from here," he says.
Bhag offered to arrange Saka's marriage to one of his distant cousins, a Muslim girl, but Sca refused to marry at that point.
By day Ska works hard at harvesting wheat and millet and feeding the animals, and at night he shares a bedroom with Davender.
"If I eat two peanuts, he eats two peanuts as well, and if Davender drinks a glass of milk, I drink a glass of milk too," he says.
Ska always misses his family whom he never knew.
As a child, he pleaded with Muslim families traveling to Pakistan to look for Sadiq.
He asked others to help him write letters to his distant family, put advertisements in newspapers, and in his later years he posted advertisements on Davender's Facebook page, but for decades he received no response at all.
Coincidence played its part
Jagsir Singh was in Vancouver, British Columbia, to visit his daughter in May 2019 when his brother-in-law, who was watching Punjabi Lihar, sent him a video.
In that video, an old man in a white turban told his interlocutor, Nasser Dillon, that his brother, who was an infant at the time, went with his mother to the village of Fulwal in 1947, and nothing was known about him after that.
The man, Saka's brother Sadiq, said his father was killed in an encounter with Indian soldiers near Ludhiana, as he was about to join a refugee convoy en route to Pakistan.
"If you can see me please talk to me, who knows, I may die before meeting you?" Sadiq said in the video, addressing his brother Ska.
"Could it be that this man is the one we're talking about?" Gajser immediately asked.
He sent the link to the family in Fulwal, Davender picked up the link, Jajsir called a replacement, to show him he knew Sadiq, a farmer living outside Faisalabad, Pakistan. By about 1 p.m. the day after Jajsir called, Dillon's team was sitting next to Sadiq in Faisal Abad, to call Davinder's number on WhatsApp.
Seventy-two years have passed and Sadiq does not know what happened to their mother, and Sadiq asks his brother Saka if he still uses his childhood surname, and asks him if he has married, or if he has bought land.
They were talking about Sadiq's six sons and grandsons.
Saka was telling Sadiq about the crops he was growing, and what the village of Fulwal was like.
Sadiq recounts how he also searched for him.
He said that he once traveled 160 miles to ask in an area near India if anyone knew anything about him, and that he once went on a pilgrimage to ask a Sufi cleric if he would find his brother.
"He told me you were alive, so I was determined to keep trying," Sadiq recalls.
Within days, the brothers' friends and family began preparing passports, hoping to apply for visas so the two could meet, but politics got in their way, and then the coronavirus pandemic hit the world, closing borders.
Finally.. reunion
There was one last option for Saka and Sadiq: They could meet at the Kartarpu Pass, a visa-free pass created in 2019 that allows Indians to visit sacred Sikh sites, about three miles into Pakistan.
As the coronavirus recedes, they set a date: January 10.
In Fulwal, the Singh family arranged for news of the reunion to be broadcast over the village's loudspeakers.
The family rented a bus, and about 30 of them — plus a ska — piled up with gifts worth 50,000 rupees ($700).
In Faisalabad, the whole family of Sadiq recovered.
Ishraq, the village chief, says 70 people have collected boxes of clothes and delicious food on their bus.
It was a perfect and luminous afternoon when the two finally approached each other in Kartapur with its gleaming white and gold domes.
In a video clip that has since gone viral in India and Pakistan, Sadiq rushes into Ska's arms, the two sobbing. "We're alive and we can be together again," Sca said.
Sadiq presented his children and grandchildren one by one to his brother.
The two brothers spent three hours together before Pakistani soldiers closed the site before sunset.
"The two brothers had to be separated, as Sadiq did not let his brother go," said Dillon, who filmed the reunion.
Since that day, the brothers have continued their video calls every day, insisting on obtaining visas to visit each other.
A senior official in the Pakistani prime minister's office has promised he will help in these efforts, according to Sadiq, who is urging Saka to move to Pakistan.
“I want to make up for all the years we lost, to spend the rest of my life with my brother,” Sadiq said.
• Sadiq rushed into Ska's arms, the two sobbing, and Sca said, "We're alive, and we'll be able to be together again." Sadiq presented his children and grandchildren, respectively, to his brother.
The beginning of the tragedy
In the summer of 1947, the British, who were leaving India, made plans to draw a new frontier and divide the former colony, prompting as many as 20 million people to begin a desperate migration to what is now Pakistan.
Muslims hurried towards newly formed Pakistan, while Hindus and Sikhs flocked to India.
Historians say as many as two million people have died, as Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs face each other in waves of murder, rape and kidnapping, leaving behind torn families of widowed women and orphaned children.
Even those who were not affected by the violence found themselves living a new life, unconnected to their families, possessions, and identities.
In 1956, India and Pakistan halted efforts to reunite families across a tense border, and the two governments imposed strict visa restrictions, making physical reunification nearly impossible.
Efforts to reunite
Over the past decade, the younger generation has taken an interest again in documenting division, often relying on technology.
In 2009, a physicist from California created the 1947 Partition Archive, an online oral history project.
In 2018, Oxford students created Project Dastan, which uses 360-degree cameras to create virtual-reality versions of villages and homes left by survivors in their home country.
On YouTube, several groups of volunteers have appeared with a lofty purpose: to unite families who lost touch with their members long ago.
In the past, relatives and friends searched for each other through newspaper advertisements, word of mouth, or by posting advertisements during Hajj, the only place where Indians and Pakistanis gather.
Nasir Dillon, 37, is a Pakistani real estate agent who founded a YouTube channel called Punjabi Lihar in 2013 with a Sikh partner.
The channel has helped reunite about 200 families, Dillon estimates.
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