Nirmal Kohli

Nirmal Kohli was born in Lahore in 1939. She was the eldest of three sisters. At the time of Partition, Mrs. Kohli and her younger sister were in Sialkot with their grandmother. Her grandmother took charge of the two girls, as well as her daughter-in-law and her four children. Together they set off for India. Mrs. Kohli recalls that they could only take the bare minimum that they could carry with them, including food. When they reached the train station, there was a train approaching from Wazirabad filled with dead bodies. A few wounded survivors from the train were brought onto Mrs. Kohli’s train. Within half an hour, the train derailed because the tracks had been sabotaged. The passengers were then escorted to an army cantonment an hour’s walk away. There they lived in barracks for four months: July through October. One day, about 40 trucks arrived. In the rush to get on the trucks, the family lost Mrs. Kohli’s one-year-old cousin. Thus, they did not board the trucks. They later found out that the trucks were attacked along the way and nearly all the passengers were murdered. After some time, a train was arranged for the remaining people at the barracks. The train stopped at the river Ravi, and the passengers walked across the bridge to Dera Baba Nanak. Mrs. Kohli recalls that the air was permeated with the smell of decaying flesh, and she saw bodies lying everywhere. At this time, Mrs. Kohli’s mother and sister were supposed to be arriving on another convoy. When the convoy arrived, most of its passengers had been slaughtered. Mrs. Kohli searched through the bodies for her mother and sister. An elderly couple who had pretended to be dead during the attack, and had survived, told Mrs. Kohli’s mother that her family had gotten off the trucks at the last minute. After several hours of searching, Mrs. Kohli found her mother and sister in the crowds at Dera Baba Nanak. From there, the family boarded a train to Amritsar. At the station, they took shelter in a veranda outside. Mrs. Kohli’s whole family – grandmother, mother, aunt and seven children – lived on this open veranda for five months, braving the harsh winter. Her father set off on a bike for Delhi, with only some food, hoping that he could be reinstated at his job with the bank. He was able to secure the job, but he could not find any housing, except for an empty horse stable, into which the whole family moved. Every morning, Mrs. Kohli’s mother and grandmother would set out to look for a better place to live. Eventually, they found a one-room tenement in a colony of laborers in Delhi. Mrs. Kohli’s family lived there for several years.

Despite a shortage of money and resources, and against incredible odds, Mrs. Kohli went on to teach and become economically independent in her early twenties. She also acquired several degrees. Today she divides her time between Delhi and with her sons in the US.