From the pages of partition

Following is an excerpt from "Themes in Indian History". 

This is a real life experience of a Muslim person during the partition narrated by a Hindu.

During my visits to the History Department Library of Punjab University, Lahore, the librarian, Abdul Latif, a pious middle- aged man, would help me a lot. He would go out of his way to do my work. I found his attitude to my work so extraordinary that one day I could not help asking him, "Latif  Sahib, why do you get out of your way to help me so much?"

Latif answered " I...I mean, my father belonged to a small village in Jammu. This was a Hindu-dominated village and Hindu ruffians of the area massacred the hamlet's Muslim population in August 1947. One late afternoon, when the Hindu mob had been at its furious worst, my father discovered he was perhaps the only Muslim youth of the village left alive. He had already lost his entire family in the butchery and was looking for ways of escaping. Remembering a kind, elderly Hindu lady, a neighbour, he implored her to save him by offering him shelter at her place. The lady agreed to help my father but said, ' Son, if you hide here, they will get both of us. This is of no use. You follow me to the spot where they have piled up the dead. You lie down there as if dead and I will dump a few dead- bodies on you. Lie there among the dead through the night and run for your life towards Sailkot at the break of dawn tomorrow.'

My father agreed to the proposal. Off they went to that spot, father lay on the ground and the old lady dumped a number of bodies on him. An hour or so later a group of armed Hindu hoodlums appeared. One of them yelled, 'Any life left in anybody?' and the others started, with their crude staffs and guns, to feel any trace of life in that heap. Somebody shouted, " There is a wrist watch on that body!" and hit my father's finger with the butt of his rifle. Father used to tell how difficult it was for him to keep his outstretched palm, beneath the watch he was wearing, so utterly still. Somehow he succeded for a few seconds until one of them said ' Oh, it's only a watch. Come let us leave, it is getting dark.' Fortunately, for Abbaji, they left and my father lay there in the wretchedness the whole night, literally running for his life at the first hint of light. He did not stop until he reached Sailkot."

" I help you because that Hindu mai helped my father. I am simply returning my father's karz, his debt". 

Partition was a painful experience for all. I fail to understand how those who had lived more or less harmoniously for generations inflicted so much violence on each other.