PATIALA: In the courtyard of his home in Mehas village near Nabha, 95-year-old Bant Ram narrates a story that has stayed with him for nearly eight decades — of a Muslim-majority village once known as Mahesh Nagar, of childhood friends he never saw again, and of a massacre that turned a canal red with the bodies of the dead.“Our village belonged to the Muslims,” Bant Ram recalls, describing how the settlement, revered as sacred to Lord Shiva, had over time come to be called Mehas, though only a handful of Hindu families — six or seven in all — lived among the Muslim majority. Among his closest friends were Ajeel, Sitara and Gani, boys he grew up playing with, never once imagining a border would one day tear their world apart.When talk of Partition first began in 1947, Bant Ram says the village remained largely unshaken. Occasionally, groups would pass through at dawn, shouting slogans in support of Pakistan before moving on — a routine nobody took seriously. That changed as news of killings across the border started trickling in, and unease crept into daily life.The real turning point, he remembers, came when bodies began floating down the canal that ran through the village, carried from settlements upstream. Fear gripped Mehas overnight. Villagers began mounting guard at the entrances and along the canal, keeping vigil through the night — Hindus and Muslims alike, since even clean-shaven Hindus feared being mistaken for the “other” side amid the chaos.Muslim families, Bant Ram says, pleaded with their Hindu neighbours not to leave, fearing blame if word spread that Mehas had driven its Hindus away. His own family sent him to relatives in nearby Nadampur village for safety. It was there that news arrived of an attack on Maharaja of Patiala — a rumour, he says, that inflamed tensions further and preceded the assault on Mehas itself.What followed was carnage. According to accounts passed down by his parents, the village mosque was surrounded after prayers, and few worshippers escaped alive. Troops sent by Maharaja of Nabha eventually arrived, converting the village into a relief camp, treating the wounded and helping bury the dead in pits dug in nearby fields. Surviving Muslim residents, including his friend Sitara — who did not survive — were later evacuated to Pakistan under military escort. Bant Ram never saw his childhood friends Ajeel, Ghulam Nabi or Gani again.According to villagers, roughly three decades ago, descendants of a Mehas family that had settled in Pakistan visited the village, tracing their roots back to the very soil their ancestors had fled.Looking back, Bant Ram says the lesson of that year still holds. “Never let communal politics take root in your mind,” he says. “We are witnesses to what such an atmosphere breeds — and it is only the politicians who gain from it.”
