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carried bedding – light quilts known as
razais
in India – which they let fall when attacked or collapsing from hunger, exhaustion or illness, so that in places the whole landscape was patterned with these colourful cotton bedcovers trodden into the dust, or later, the mud. Of all the horrors Dad describes, somehow the image of those thousands of abandoned quilts – and what they represent – is the one that I cannot shake from my mind.
    Dad saw the notorious refugee trains – both Muslim and Hindu – which arrived at their destinations full of dead passengers; he saw camps where there was almost nothing to sustain the refugees and where many hundreds of dead were left behind each time a group moved on; he saw the suffering increase a hundred times over when September rains caused floods and even more chaos and death – but the betrayal by the rajah of a Sikh state called Faridkot is the event that seems to have disturbed him most; it is the one he talked about to Tessa and me. In particular he mentioned to us several times seeing a baby that had had its throat cut but was still alive, trying to crawl into shade – it obviously haunted him, but we never understood why this child affected him more than all the hundreds of others.
    On 27 August Dad wrote that he had been to see the Rajah of Faridkot to discuss, and organise, the orderly departure of the 60–70,000-strong Muslim community in his state. Dad had not been impressed by the rajah: ‘He is a child in many ways. He giggles, talks about his armoured cars . . . Two hours of him was enough.’ But he had come to an agreement with him that he must hold the refugees for ten days until everything was ready for them, and ‘that we expected the roads and railway not to be molested . . . all in a most diplomatic way of course’.
    The rajah had agreed the route that the refugees would take out of his state: they would travel towards the north gate where Dad would have a battalion standing by to protect them once they crossed the border (the Punjab Boundary Force was not allowed to operate within the independent Sikh states), but when the time came the rajah sent them out on a different road, west, to the neighbouring state of Muktsar, where there was no protection.
    Dad seems to have discovered this on what he described as his worst day. He was touring the area with Colonel Sant Singh, an Indian officer, when in Muktsar they came upon a refugee column, miles long, that had been attacked by Sikhs hiding in the elephant grass at the side of the road. ‘I saw and counted 300 murdered men, women and children and about the same number of wounded, mostly so badly cut across the neck that the head wobbled; and the most brutal attacks on women and children,’ he wrote on 7 September. ‘We picked up about twenty children from two weeks old to about two years who had had parents and relatives blotted out. I cannot tell what a massacre it was . . .’
    â€˜But worse was to come. In Faridkot State near our border we met the sick, injured, aged, maimed, dead, who could not move. There were 140 women in labour, many had miscarriages; babies sucking breasts of their dead mothers, many corpses – for cholera had broken out. Darling, I hope never to see such poor exhausted people suffer so much ever again . . . I am afraid it affects me very much.’
    It is not absolutely clear that the dead and wounded Dad saw in Muktsar were from Faridkot, but it seems so because, though he does not say what he did next in his letter to Mum, he told Tessa and me that he was so distraught and full of rage that he drove straight to Faridkot and stormed into the rajah’s palace with his revolver in his hand, intending to shoot him – but the rajah pleaded for his life and said he had only allowed his people to attack the refugees because they thought he was pro-Muslim and he had