She married across the India-Pakistan border. Her children won't

With a ceasefire now in place, both countries must reinstate people-to-people links to help build mutual understanding.

- Debarshi Dasgupta

When Ms Afsheen Jahangir, an Indian national, married a Pakistani based in Karachi in 2014, she was continuing her family's long tradition of cross-border marriages.

The 32-year-old is a member of the Silawati community spread across the contiguous region of Pakistan's Sindh and India's Rajasthan, who often marry their distant cousins.

Her elder brother took a Silawati Pakistani woman as his wife the same day she got married. Three aunts and an uncle had earlier also married into Silawati Pakistani families.

For Ms Jahangir's family, these alliances were a way to cement ties with relatives in Pakistan. But this tradition, which has long survived vicissitudes of the India-Pakistan relationship since Partition in 1947, could end with Ms Jahangir.

Speaking on the phone from Karachi on May 6, she told me she would never allow her son and daughter—aged seven and nine, respectively—to marry an Indian. "I would rather have my daughter sit at home as a spinster than have her marry someone from India," said Ms Jahangir.

Travel between the two South Asian neighbours has become increasingly prohibitive in recent years, making family reunions challenging.

A train service between Karachi and Jodhpur that Ms Jahangir and her family had previously relied on remains suspended since 2019 because of strained bilateral ties, forcing her to take a long circuitous route via Lahore and then enter India through Attari in Punjab each time she wanted to see her parents in Rajasthan. What should have been a journey of a little over 700km turned into one of nearly 2,000km.

Worse followed in April, after the Attari-Wagah border was closed following a terror attack in Pahalgam, forcing Ms Jahangir to cut short her visit to India. No one knows when the border will reopen.