Rafia Abid Siddiqui was born in Hyderabad Deccan and was 10-years-old at the time of partition. She migrated to Pakistan with her family in 1949; theytravelled via a ship from Bombay to Karachi.After spending six months in Karachi, the family moved to Peshawar for a few years.
Siddiqui recalls living through three different situations in her lifetime. She remembers a life of luxury in Hyderabad Deccan, where her family lived in a big house and had several domestic helpers to manage household chores. Life, however, changed after the family moved to Pakistan, where they found themselves in a house without a roof. Siddiqui recalls a time when her father and uncle were very concerned about reports of a hurricane forecasted to hit Karachi. She had never seen her father so much worried before. Life changed for her yet again when she migrated to America in 1972.
Siddiqui speaks fondly of her father, Mehdi Ali Siddiqui. She recalls that when her family was moving to Karachi, they did not quite know what to expect. They had left without any belongings except some of her father’s books. “After arriving here, my father wrote a novel (Qurbani) about Partition which was an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities,” she says. Her uncle, on the other hand, wrote an adaptation of Wuthering Heights. She says she only recently found out through her father’s autobiography that he had been held under house arrest in days leading up to the partition. “This treatment led to his decision to migrate,” she says.
Her father had been a judge in Hyderabad Deccan. Later in Pakistan, he would preside over a case involving Saadat Hasan Manto who was under trial for one of his stories. Siddiqui fondly recalls that Manto mentioned her father in one of his writings.
Published in Daily Times, July 14th , 2017.
