he 1947 partition of India continues to cast a long shadow over the region. The borders were drawn hastily, giving the British a messy exit out of the region, leaving behind years of simmering tensions between two sovereign states. Over 75 years later, recollections of the Partition still haunt many survivors. The Partition triggered one of the bloodiest upheavals in human history through a terrifying outbreak of violence with Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other.

The carnage was especially intense, with arson, massacres, mass abductions, forced conversions and savage sexual violence in the Punjab. It is an epochal event to modern identity in South Asia just as the Holocaust is to the identity among Jews. It continues to guide how the populaces in postcolonial South Asia visualise their past, present and future.

Several conflicts in Kashmir, the Punjab, Bangladesh, East India and Gujarat started with the bloodshed of 1947. Kashmir is still fighting for independence. A massive chunk of Punjab’s history and culture was lost through a series of land ruptures.

Bangladesh has gone through division and migration, first becoming East Pakistan and then fighting for secession from Pakistan.

Many survivors of the Partition carry the agony, frequently finding it difficult to celebrate the “independence.” Some these dates as a rupture of land that brought about intergenerational trauma. Partition molded the lives of the survivors, their children, and their grandchildren dispersed all over the world.

My grandmother told me the tale of her perilous journey. It was a story about the journey that was forced upon them. I have heard this story over and over again. It is etched in my heart and mind. Every time it gave me goosebumps. What I didn’t realise until much later in life was that this was an incomplete story.

In the mid-2000s, I began reading Partition literature, voraciously, every book I could find. I was taught a skewed narrative about the Partition at school, so I was shocked by what I uncovered. I had to unlearn and relearn a lot. This was long before I was a writer, long before I ever envisioned myself writing for a national publication. After exhausting the local library, I turned to the internet. I found numerous pieces but struggled to find personal accounts from survivors. It is heart-wrenching to know a multitude of stories that were documented over the years, many lost in time, and many still reminisced to great-grandchildren.

My grandmother told me the tale of her perilous journey. It was a story about the journey that was forced upon them. I have heard this story over and over again. It is etched in my heart and mind. Every time it gave me goosebumps. What I didn’t realise until much later in life was that this was an incomplete story. So engrossed was I with the dangerous journey, the separation and the reunion and the anxiety surrounding it, that it never occurred to me what she went through when she realised that her husband was missing. Or what was her house in India like? What I have with me is only a vague glimpse of the small two-room house that was once her home. How different were her two lives — the one in Pakistan and the other in India.

Today, I have rough images that are part of her tale but I don’t have her story. I never will. She is 86 years old now and perpetually ill. We know she is going. And with her is going her story of that harrowing period in Indian history that transformed her life forever. Do I already regret this loss? I believe, I will. These, and many that have gone to the graves, untold, are not just stories of the movement, a shift, a dislocation and a relocation — these are layers and layers of the customs, cultures, homes, and community life they cast off and the new life they rebuilt.

The writer is a   freelance journalist based in Karachi