BROKEN BORDERS, UNBROKEN BONDS

THE YEARNING TO RECONNECT WITH LOST ROOTS, EMBODIED BY ARTEFACTS AND SHARED PAIN, TRANSCENDS BORDERS, AFFIRMING AN ENDURING BOND THAT TIME CANNOT ERASE

- KISHWAR DESAI

THE LETTER WE HAVE PLACED IN A VITRINE AT THE PARTITION MUSEUM IN Amritsar is jagged and torn; the edges of it are like shards of broken glass—the sharpness of which still wounds across the chasm of 75 years.

Kehar Singh longs for his wife, Zainab, whom he had rescued from a terrifying mob and had married. But later, Zainab was rescued from him by the government machinery, which ruled that Muslim women had to be sent to the newly formed "Pakistan" and Hindu and Sikh women had to be brought back, forcibly if needed.

He narrates how when he and Zainab were passing through Patti Town on January 1, 1948, while going to see some relatives, she was arrested by the police and placed in a transit camp in Amritsar. He adds that in the police station, "she was weeping and telling the police she was not willing to go to Pakistan and that she also had her contented wish to stay with me …"

But while we can hear the cries of Kehar Singh, who remained in Tarn Taran and Zainab, who was transported back to Lahore, their love story is one of far too many divisions and ruptured lives which dotted every blood-soaked step of the Partition. Most of the stories went undocumented because, for Partition survivors, love is

another country which offers no refuge to the brokenhearted.

Fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, and children disappeared as though they had never existed—and that is why, till today, each generation born of those refugees cannot but long to go back in time and find that utopia, ephemeral though it may be.

The real dividing line that Sir Cyril Radcliffe drew was not on the ground but through a lifestyle, a culture, an identity, and millions of dreams.