Islamabad(IANS) : Seven relatives of a 100-year-old Kashmiri Sikh who died in September and was cremated in Indian Kashmir have arrived in Pakistan to immerse his ashes in the Jhelum river in accordance with his last wish.
Sant Singh Teg was born on April 13, 1907 in Hattian Dupatta, a small town some 25 km from Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
He left his native town soon after the subcontinent was partitioned in 1947 and settled in Jammu.
Teg, the father of four sons and four daughters from two wives, was injured in a road accident two years ago and had been confined to bed since then. The centenarian died on Sep 16 after his condition deteriorated.
Teg had visited Pakistan in 1962 at the invitation of president Ayub Khan, but could not travel to his hometown.
“The yearning to revisit the place of his birth was alive till his death,” Dawn Wednesday quoted his son Partap Singh as saying on the phone from Hattian Dupatta.
Partap Singh, his elder brother Gurpartap Singh, sister Nirlet Kaur, brother-in-law Harbhajan Singh, niece Mandeep Kaur and cousin Jagjeet Singh Sudan and his wife Surinder Kaur Sudan crossed into Pakistan from the Wagah border on Saturday.
They travelled to Hattian Dupatta on Monday for a reunion with their relatives here who had converted to Islam after partition.
“Ever since my father left his birthplace in 1947, he had not been able to revisit it. He had a great longing for this place where he spent the best years of his life,” Partap Singh said.
Teg’s family owned a transport company before partition and he had driven his buses countless times on the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad-Rawalpindi highway.
“After the launch of the Muzaffarabad-Srinagar bus service (in April 2005), my father’s dormant desire to visit his birthplace reawakened, but this could not materialise for one reason or the other,” Partap Singh said.
Jammu-based journalist and human rights activist Balraj Puri had even contacted Pakistani Kashmir Prime Minister Attique Ahmed Khan in May in an attempt to facilitate Teg’s visit.
The centenarian, however, passed away before the visit could materialise.