Throwbacks of a fire-threatened evacuation
It was around 11.30 at night when the doorbell rang. A police officer had come to warn us about a massive wildfire in the hills near our home in the Bay Area of California. He wanted us to be prepared for evacuation. “Pack a suitcase and be prepared to leave if the fire gets out of control,” he said, as he left.
How do you pack 25 years of your life in a suitcase? In that moment of panic, I grabbed the important and the irreplaceable documents and old photographs. Time passes slowly when fear and anxiety are clouding your mind. I looked around the house as we waited for the officer to return and tell us it was time to leave.
Around us, was the story of our family’s life etched in each thing we owned and it would all be left behind, the coffee-table book on Titanic bought by my then nine-year-old daughter with her pocket money, because as a child she was obsessed by the fateful ship; my husband’s Star Wars sheet that hangs in his Man Cave that he’s had since he was seven; the old German tea set my grandfather bought for me, his first grandchild even before I was born. The list seemed endless. What do you choose and what do you leave behind?
I asked my girls to pack a bag each. My daughter wanted to know if she could take her retro record collection because it was important to her. I wanted to scream at her and tell her to just pack essentials but I stopped, I remembered an incident from childhood.
It was 1984, the then Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi had been assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. As a fallout of the assassination, riots erupted across the country and Sikhs were massacred and their homes looted. As we kept hearing of these incidents, my dad was worried about our safety, so he told each of us to pack a bag with just our essentials in case there was rioting in Chandigarh and we had to leave our home. I went to my room and the only thing I could think of taking with me was my Sony Walkman and the collection of cassettes. Thankfully, Chandigarh remained safe.
I look back and laugh at my absurdity of considering my Walkman the most important thing.
I thought of my family who had to leave their home in Pakistan after the partition of India. I remembered my great grandmother’s stories of her silver that she had hid behind the bricks in her house in Sukho,
Pakistan, with the hope of retrieving them when she went back, which she never could. I thought of how my father-inlaw, a little boy then, came to India as a refugee. He would reminisce, misty-eyed of his childhood in the North West Frontier Province and how they came to India to set up their new life with only a bag. In the possibility of losing my home, I understood how painful it must have been for them.
We did not need to evacuate that night, the wind helped keep the fire from spreading to our street. However, no gust of wind can take away the realisations of that night.
HOW DO YOU PACK 25 YEARS OFYOUR LIFE IN A SUITCASE? IN PANIC, I GRABBED IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS AND OLD PHOTOS