Relu's tryst with freedom

NEW DELHI: He was born in 1947 on a train from Pakistan to India brimming with refugees who'd seen massacres of passengers. His family was fleeing Montgomery, near Lahore, on September 3, 1947, when his mother went into labour at the last station inside Pakistan. Born in a rail compartment, Chander Mohan Sharma was called ‘Relu'.
Former deputy general manager of VSNL, Sharma says his friends, who called him 'Relu', are now all gone."Yet, my childhood name connects me to trains and also my old birth place, Raiwind, the last railway station in Pakistan before Ferozepur in India," says Sharma. This route closed in 1965 when India and Pakistan went to war.
"I still remember, my sister in labour inside one of the special coaches that Pandit Nehru had sent to transport refugees from Pakistan to India. Suddenly, an old woman sitting next to my sister took charge of the situation and helped her deliver Chander. There was no lighting in compartments on instructions from the Gurkha soldiers. The delivery took place under torchlight," says Janak Sharma, Chander Mohan's 70-year-old maternal aunt, who
was present there as a seven-year-old.
The hand of providence was evident as the old woman, who turned midwife, kept asking to be let inside the compartment to deaf ears when the train was leaving Montgomery. That was until another one of Chander Mohan's uncles on the train, Baldev Raj, pulled her in just in time.
Recalls Chander Mohan, "My uncle helped the woman without knowing who she was. His kind-heartedness was immediately returned by God, who saved my mother's life and mine."
When an Indian engine took all the passengers to the safety of Ferozepur in Punjab an hour later, people turned rapturous and performed a puja for Chander Mohan, considering him their lucky mascot. It took four months for Chander Mohan's father to locate his son and wife at Hisar as they had left Pakistan separately.
On Pakistan's independence day, Chander Mohan and his wife Veena Sharma say, "For us, India and Pakistan are just two names created by hatred, unleashed by a few individuals. Love still binds the two people. When we visited Pakistan looking for our house in Montgomery, we got such love from Muslims there that we realised how misplaced our fear of them was.. because of the memory of Partition massacres."
Sharma, who has set up satellite phone connections on Rajdhani Express trains as a VSNL officer, still looks fondly at the rail coaches — for ‘Relu' they are a lifeline in a way not many would understand.
One day he saw a locomotive of the same make that brought his family from Pakistan at the Railway Museum in Delhi. When Railway authorities learnt about his life story, they said they wanted his story to be displayed at the museum. Rightly so, as it is one of hope and a new birth.