The last time I went to our house in Ludhiana was five years ago, on a summer afternoon in 2017. The officials from The Partition Museum had arranged a meeting. I went there a day before the meeting to that house which strangely still smelled of Dadi. She was all over the place, and I could still hear her; it’s strange how I could recollect her voice like she’d been there a day or two ago.

She had left us a long time ago. I was nineteen then, numb on hearing the news of my seventy-seven-year-old best friend's departure. Maybe it wasn’t her death that made me feel so vulnerable, we were all expecting it. What was it then? Perhaps the feeling that the stories she carried with her had lost its pages, the storyteller it truly deserved. Nobody could tell a story the way she did. A story with all its highs and lows narrated in a way that would make it stay with us forever.  What about the stories? What about their struggles, what about survival? What about love and fate? What about it?

I shed no tears that day. Instead, I went around the house like a lunatic in search of lost pages which I hoped she’d left behind. I wished she’d left something: a record, a diary, some pieces of papers that I wished to hold on to. I found none: nothing, which I knew was going to be the outcome, but I searched anyway, like a mad woman who’d lost her all, searching for the last tint of hope in places she knew she was not going to find any.

Dadi always told us that no matter how hard you try, you can never tell a story more beautifully than the way it’s been already told: that first-hand experiences mattered.

When in school, our history teachers taught us about Partition, and I bragged about how my grandparents came from Pakistan. I told my classmates these stories of how they’d come from the other side of the border and made India their home. They listened with glimmering eyes as I told them the story of my Dada and Dadi, their love, my parents, our life and eventually my existence, which all tracks back to the year 1947. The year of creation and destruction, the year of love, fate, faith and survival, the year of many unanswered questions, displacement and lots more that are yet to be addressed.

My Dadi came to Amritsar just as soon as they had announced which part belonged to Hindustan and which one went to the newly formed country of Pakistan. There were riots all around. The country which was celebrating freedom a few days ago was now filled with images of bloodshed, displacement, separation, and everything worse one could imagine: the feeling of being an outsider in one’s land. I’ve often heard her murmur, “How is this independence? They took my home away from me. My family, my village, my life, my everything. They took Pritam out of Pritam.”

Her father put her on a train to Amritsar. She was twenty-two and on her own. He had said she would be safe there and promised to join her just very soon. That was the last time she saw her father, the streets of Gujranwala, and home.

Whenever I asked her about her home in Gujranwala, she would rapidly become her younger self and then describe it to me with picture-perfect details—

“We were a family of six, four children, the youngest was as young as two years old, and I was the eldest of all. My sister Nimrat was three years younger to me, but we were more like friends. We would roam around the streets and go to the Gurdwara, spend most of our time in the langar room. Seva took up a good deal of our time, but we liked immersing ourselves in the activities within the gurdwara as we chitchatted all day long. Our house was right next to it and my father was always at service; he was a leader of sorts, was respected by all, he was at the forefront in bringing together communities and solving their issues. We had visitors every day, some would come from nearby places and others from far and wide. My father had quite a reputation, but nonetheless, he always stayed humble.”

Her eyes would sparkle as she described home, and all the things she loved, but would slowly settle on tears, and fall silent.

My grandmother, whom we fondly called Dadi, lived in this part of the border for more than half of her life, but every time someone talked about home, she was reminded of Gujranwala, and always wished to go back there, “at least one single time,” she would say.
“I never had enough of it and I don’t think I ever will.”

My grandmother didn’t know anyone when she first reached Amritsar. She had clung on to her bag and made way into the refugee camp at Khalsa College.

“Name?”
“Pritam Kaur”
“Age?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Where are you from?”
“Gujranwala.”
“Is somebody with you?”
“No.”
“Are you looking for someone?”
“No.”
“Have you got any records and documents?”

My grandmother was all by herself at the age of twenty-two in a new nation. She lived with other women who found themselves there under similar circumstances. Some lost their parents, some their husbands, their children, the others were hurt, abused and raped. Some were mothers, others pregnant, there were women of all ages, young, old, all of them devastated. Some were crying, others numb, a few were narrating their experiences in the hope to get rid of their sadness. At some places were dead bodies of unidentified people, covered in white. Volunteers were distributing staple chapatis, others looking for lost families. It was in the long, winding queue for food with the hungry, weary and desolate refugees at the Khalsa college camp that destiny decided to change her life once and forever.

Pritam Kaur, my dadi, met my grandfather. They got married, had my mom, got her married off, travelled the world and lived filthy rich in love for the rest of their lives. My grandmother, this loud cheerful woman and my grandfather, who was a calm and quiet man were so much in love. But that was not all, they also had a devastating past that came to them every now and then, made them cry, and feel weak in their knees.

My grandfather would have nightmares and lose his sleep on most nights. He watched his three brothers being killed by the mob while trying to flee the violence and could do nothing about it. The violence of Partition had a lasting effect on his life.

“This history was written with blood. Everybody was selfish!”, he would say. “And the others, they were simply manipulated.”  Even to this day, a tint of blood would make him feel uneasy. He held on to his greatest possession when he came from the other side of the border: a leather briefcase alongside his education certificates. He was thirty when he fled Mianwali, to come to Amritsar. There was little that he owned, but he knew this could help him start a little something of his own.

“We lived with people of all communities, celebrated all festivals, ate and slept together, but there was this rising tension year after year. We knew freedom was going to come with a price, but never in the worst of our nightmares did we think that it would take away so much from us. The people who until then had lived in seeming harmony, looked at one another with suspiciousness. Jinnah wanted a separate land for Muslims, the leaders of Congress weren’t ready to compromise, and for their selfish political gains, they bailed on ten million People. Ten million lives were shattered,” grandfather would say.

“Just as soon as I reached the Railway Station at Amritsar, I didn’t quite know where to go, so I followed the thousands.

We walked a kilometre or two and reached this camp at Khalsa College; unsure of the future, I went in to fill in my details.

“Name?”
“Bhagwan Singh Maini”
“Age?”
“Thirty.”
“Where are you from?”
“Mianwali.”
“Are you looking for someone?”
“No.”
“Show me your documents.”

“I didn’t know where to begin, but I knew I wasn’t going to stop. I took my certificates to places, looked up for all possible jobs, slept with the refugees, hoped for better days, lined up for food with the others and it was in one such moment, in a never-ending line for food when your grandmother came into my life.”

“When I first met your Grandmother, she was young and blossoming. I was sure I was going to marry her the moment I laid my eyes on her. She was wearing a lemon yellow Kurti, with all kohled eyes. We didn’t speak that much, but I could see her eyes dancing. This was July of 1947. I was thirty when we were first introduced to each other. We were engaged the very same day as expected in those times.”

The tension and the never-ending violence kept them away from being in contact, and grandfather had learned to teach himself to move on with life, crushing every dream that he had dreamt with her in my mind. He had wanted to take her to the Gurudwara at Mianwali, and to the Mela that happens there every year. He wanted to give her the best possible life, buy her all the colorful bangles and dupattas; he wanted her to be part of all his happiness and support him in times of despair. My grandfather had desperately wanted to build a home with her, but that looked like an impossible dream until fate took a little turn to bring them back together.

“I thought I had lost her to destiny, but the same destiny had perhaps brought us back together. The moment when I saw her again, I shed tears, I don’t possibly know why I cried, or why she cried. She came running to me, we didn’t quite know what to do or what we were feeling, she clung to my shirt tightly, and smiled and I held her face with my hands, a moment of relief, of belongingness, how much had I craved for it…”

Pritam Kaur was pale now, a little wrinkled, perhaps that’s the kind of effect that this turmoil had brought on people. Children had lost their childishness, young people their charm and charisma, everyone was out of their minds, and rightfully so. Whatever was happening was something none of us had expected and it was devastating.

My grandparents spent quite a lot of time recalling the past. Grandfather’s brothers being murdered, and grandmother’s sister being picked away, her fleeing from Gujranwala in the car of a Muslim man, hiding in a carpet, unsure of fate, and the stories they had witnessed through their journeys in the search for a safer space. They would often say, “We blamed everyone, Nehru, Jinnah, and all the leaders who were in no way affected by any of it. They were at the comfort of their homes, under all security, while horror crept in millions of lives and destroyed us forever. The British too had left and we, the children of this land, were barely making it, struggling to be alive, waiting to be found, either as bodies, or as scarred people waiting to live.”

My classmates listened to their story with a lot of curiosity, but there was always this unsatisfactory feeling that dwelled in me: I will never be able to emote the exact emotions and the story will never feel complete. It’s not my story, and like how dadi would say, “Maybe I will never do justice to the story.”

“So, what do we do now?” She had asked grandfather after fate had reunited them.
“I’ll get a job, we’re sure to get a house with the documents I’ve provided.” he stopped, and then continued, “Let’s get married?”
She thought it was the most sensible thing to say. Nobody wanted to be left alone in this world, and if all this wouldn’t have happened, and if they were still back there, in their homes, leading a life of normalcy, they were to get married sooner or later. “Destiny had indeed brought them together, so wouldn’t it be the right thing to do: to go with the flow?” She thought.

Pritam Kaur and Bhagwan Singh Maini got married eventually. They reunited with her mother and her brother. Grandfather got a Sarkari job, and they all moved to Ludhiana. They were finally given space, their own space, this place that we now call home. “This is where you were born beta, and your mother too. This is where we learned to dream again and build ourselves up from the bone,” my grandmother used to say.  

Grandfather would often think of the past and the things they left behind, but the baggage of nightmares kept revisiting them on most days. They had to learn to live with it. Grandmother often broke down remembering Nimrat, and her father. She lamented, “She was a little girl, how can someone rip her off? It should have been me instead.” She would scream and wail and cry herself to sleep. Those days were tough, but this storm too had learned to calm down after a while. Her ‘Phulkari coat’ was a lot of help to her: it helped lift her spirit, made her smile, reminisce and gave her the strength to lead life.

“What is it about the Phulkari coat, dadi, what makes it so special?” I had asked her many times. She would just smile. It was my mother who told me what her grandmother had told her.

This coat was the first thing Pritam Kaur had made with her own hands. Her mother was the one who taught her the Phulkari art. Pritam would follow her day-in and day-out as a child and pestered her mother to teach her the tricks. My great grandmother got her all the necessary materials and taught her the tedious craft. She asked her to hold on to it close to her heart, and when Pritam finally made the coat, her mother held her close and said that she’d never seen something as beautiful as this one. It has been with her ever since.

The officials from the Partition Museum joined me for the meeting the very next day. We finished up with all the formalities and I was ready to share the briefcase and the Phulkari coat with them.

“Maam, is there anything you would like to share, we would like to make sure you don’t miss out on anything.”

“That briefcase was the first thing my grandfather bought with his salary as a gift to his father. It contains the Guru Granth Sahib that his father owned, one written in Shahmukhi and the Phulkari coat was a reminder for my dadi that she could do anything and make it beautiful. The rest is a history written with blood.”

It is time I go back there again and revisit the history.