PARTITION - additional recordings I Andrew Whitehead I ___________________________________/ CD-32 Inder Cheema interviewed by AW at his home on Southport Island, Maine on 13 October, 2003 in the presence of his mother, Leela Thompson Inder was bom in Srinagar, in the same room in the same nursing home and his mother. He was about 10 at the time of the raiders’ attack, and was evacuated by tonga from Baramulla to Srinagar (along with his aunt Pam and her two young children) very shortly before the tribesmen reached Baramulla. His mother was then already in Srinagar. His father, a Sikh, had died a few years earlier. Inder has worked for most of his life in the oil industry for Exxon variously in Yemen, Malaysia, Paris, London and New Jersey. He is warm, kind, affable, good humoured, with balding grey hair and a moustache - regards himself as a Sikh but was never devout, and nor was his father. Very close companionate marriage with his Canadian wife, Jane - they met at college in Canada and married in spite of the opposition of her parents. They have three grownup and married children, and three grandchildren with a fourth imminent. Inder visited Srinagar and Baramulla with his family in the late 1980s, and met Sister Priscilla They live in a lovely house on Southport Island, Maine about four miles beyond Boothbay Harbour. They are retired, but own some nearby holiday apartments - in one of which I stayed for three nights. Also met there Inder’s cousin Amrita, who lives in Vancouver, and was one of the cousins who shared the tonga ride with him. On the evening of the interview, the four of us had had a Szechuan noodle dish prepared by Inder, and then chocolate cherry fudge (from Michigan) and ice cream. (Recording largely not of broadcast quality - some background noise and interruptions) AW: TELL ME ABOUT THE MOOD THE NIGHT BEFORE YOU LEFT BARAMULLA IC: Well, as an approximately a ten year old boy, my recollection of what happened in the fall of 1947 is a matter of snapshots. The first snapshot that I have in my mind is seeing these army trucks going up the valley with Kashmir -... towards Srinagar, that’s what I would call up the valley but anyway, going towards Srinagar. And our home was on the main road between Rawalpindi aqnd Srinagar, we were 30 miles from Srinagar so pretty close to Srinagar. And these trucks were just streaming up towards Srinagar. So - with army personnel on these trucks - 1