Puchi was telling me a story about our family history. “Our great grandmother was a war bride,” she said casually.

“That sounds so barbaric,” I said. “What’s a war bride?”

“That’s when they kill all the men and take the women.” That does sound barbaric.

Puchi learned about our great grandmother in her second grade history class. She came home one day from the Burnhall School in Abbottabad and told my mother about a disturbing history lesson from earlier in the day. The teacher told them a story about Sardar Samad Khan from the Afridi tribe. He was the General for Kashmir under Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the first Maharaja of the Sikh empire from 1801 when he was crowned at the age of twenty-one until his death in 1839. The Maharaja had captured many principalities including some of the northern areas of regions that are now part of  Pakistan.

Ten years after the death of Maharajah Ranjit Singh in 1839, the British appointed Maharaja Gulab Singh. The principalities in the northern areas were not paying attention to the new Maharaja, so General Sardar Samad Khan hosted a lunch in Gilgit, a mountainous region in the foothills of the Karakorum mountain range. The General invited the twelve heads of state who were giving the Maharaja trouble, to the lunch in Gilgit.  Eleven of them showed up. The twelfth head of state, who did not attend, was from an area called Yasin, a high mountain valley in the Karakorum mountains.

After lunch, Sardar Samad Khan took each one of the Kings out for a walk around the grounds to discuss affairs of state. And after they left the compound he had each of their heads chopped off. He then went to Yasin to find the King of the principality who had not shown up for the lunch. After arriving in Yasin, Sardar Samad Khan and his army killed all the men and Sardar Samad Khan took the King’s wife as his seventh war bride. I’m not sure I would call her a “bride.” This seems like the definition of forced “marriage” to me.

Ami, hearing Puchi tell this story said, “Oh, yes, that story.” And she took out a photo and said, “This is the man you learned about in your history lesson. He’s your great grandfather.”

 

Our great grandfathers’ seventh war bride from Yasin, was our great grandmother. Ami used to say that there was a connection between our family and the Wali (or King) of Swat, a Valley in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan. Apparently there were two sisters from the royal family of Swat. One was married to the King of Yasin and the other to the King of Chitral, another mountainous valley in the Karakorum mountain range. So it could be that our great grandmother was also descended from the royal family of Swat. This is all getting really confusing, or should I say Khanfusing? My head is spinning with all this family history.  

My mother heard these and other family stories from our grandfather, her father-in-law,  Brigadier Rematullah Khan, my father’s father. There’s another story about our grandfather being held as a Prisoner of War in Srinagar, Kashmir for a year, but that’s another story that I’ll need Puchi to tell me in greater detail.

 

And now I’m beginning to piece it together. Because our great grandfather was the General for Kashmir under Maharaja Ranjit Singh, his family settled there. My father and his siblings were all born in Kashmir and they knew the rugged terrain of the northern areas well. Before partition, as Puchi told me, our uncle, Aslam Khan, covered up all the paths to Gilgit, Hunza, Yasin, and Chitral, so that the Indians would not be able to traverse them and claim the territories for India, and that’s how they became part of Pakistan in the Partition. There’s also a story about how Aslam Khan fought the Indians off in Baramulla and other regions in Kashmir, but I don’t know the details of that story.

 

Two generations of military men. Our grandfather, is seated in the middle and Brigadier Aslam Khan is seated next to him on the right. My father is standing directly behind his father in the naval uniform.  

Over time, most of the family dropped the name Afridi, but Puchi says that if you look up old school records for my father, his name was listed as Mohammed Afzal Khan Afridi. Ami used to say that the Afridis were one of the lost tribes of Israel. Puchi says some of the Afridis in Lucknow are being DNA tested to determine whether this is in fact true. So depending on how that turns out, we could also be part Jewish. Maybe that’s why there’s such a similarity between the spellings of Khan, the Muslim name, and Kahn, the Jewish name?

 

Our father as a young naval officer, the third generation of military men in his family.