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 As tributes continued to pour in at the Chennaionline message board for Kalpana Chawla, who perished along with six others when the Columbia disintegrated over Texan skies, we received a mail from a reader with an article on 'The Odyssey of the Chawlas'. Here we reproduce the piece:
On February 1, just 16 minutes before the Columbia Space Shuttle was to make its scheduled touch down, at the end of its 28th mission, it exploded over Texas, at a height of 200,000 feet. Lost in that explosion were seven lives, including that of Kalpana Chawla, 41 -- a horrific end to a life that had its genesis in horror of a quite different kind.
It was sultry, and dark, on an August evening in 1947 when Banarsi Lal Chawla, then 14, lay on a railway track, thirsty, hungry, unconscious and bleeding. Around him, open coal wagons echoed with the cries of children, most of whom were living the final hours of their lives. Chawla remembers that day in August 1947, when one-fifth of the world's population was convulsed in the throes of Partition and forced to flee their homes.
"People were packed into the open wagons from 8 a.m., like potatoes. Hardly had it moved a few kilometres, when the train was stopped at Shahdra, on the outskirts of Lahore. While my family including my mother was sitting inside the wagon, I had to be content with a perch on top of a joint between two wagons. That is where I got a place."
As the warm morning made way for a blistering hot noon and faded to evening, people began a desperate search for water. Food, by then, was a luxury not even thought of Chawla joined hundreds of other men, women and children lining up to sip the dirty water that had filled the pits near the track -- water from the rains of the day before. He then returned to his perch, and that is all he recalls. Around 10 p.m., his uncle found Chawla unconscious, precariously close to the wagon wheel -- he had fallen off his perch, in his stupor.
His uncle took him to yet another pit, gave him dirty water to drink, and washed the deep gash in the same water. Chawla returned to his perch, his feet dangling down the side of the wagon's cabled-joint, and continued his vigil along with several hundred others. As the night progressed, a mob that had gathered began firing, with the intent of avenging itself for the killing of Muslims in India. One bullet whistled past Chawla, brushing his ears. That hiss, of death passing within inches, remains a landmark sound among the many that comprise the noisy, eventful, maverick life that Chawla went on to lead.
He was 14 then -- and it was not even his first brush with death. A few days earlier, as the news of the massacre of Hindus in Pakistani villages began to pour in, Chawla, his mother, two brothers and a sister had moved to Choorkana Mandi from their village Shehupura. With his father away in Bikaner on work, it was left to Chawla to lead the family's exodus from their ancestral village.
 Despite moving to the safety of his uncle's house in Choorkana Mandi, he couldn't get over the thought of his cattle, which were left unattended in the village. So he coerced his uncle to accompany him to their village to rescue the cattle. En route, an acquaintance met them and warned of mass killings, and pleaded with them to go back. Chawla's uncle sent the boy back and went forward on his own. He never returned.
"I was saved because I returned to the town," Chawla recalls, with little show of visible emotion as he talks of a past that changed his life forever. Chawla's exodus from the dusty outskirts of Lahore into northern India where he rebuilt his life, was to peak when his daughter, Kalpana, became an astronaut. Chawla saw Kalpana's achievement as vindication, as the final sign that the wounds of Partition had been healed.
Kalpana's story is incomplete without the story of her parents, especially that of Banarasi Lal Chawla, who landed in the wilderness of Karnal a few days after August 15. Chawla's father had been awaiting his family, for days, at the Amritsar railway station. It was a hopeless wait, since a group of refugees from Lahore had told him that his children and brother had been killed. Later, he was told they were alive -- and he did not know what to believe. On August 18, at about 2 a.m. when the open coal wagons sidled into Amritsar carrying hundreds of refugees, many of them dead, Chawla was into his sixth day of waiting. The family, now reunited, took a train leaving for Delhi, then the ultimate destination for the millions of refugees fleeing Pakistan.
(to be continued)
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