Punch news She walked out of her bed room a few minutes after I arrived, the pallu of her sari draped, as always, across her legal shoulder, Gujarati in vogue. Shireen* smiled at me as she slowly made her way to the sofa, her short grey hair resting on her neck. For the following couple of hours, we sat in the lounge, amid remnants that each informed their very possess fable. An over 60-year-conventional grandfather clock from England, her father’s rocking chair from conventional Lahore, a table carved by woodworkers in Bombay (now known as Mumbai) several decades ago. Shireen rested her hands, etched with fine lines, in her lap and I seen her fingers. I may well visualise a younger version of her joyfully playing the piano, a career abruptly halted by the partition of British India in 1947.
“We really belong to both places,” she began. “We belong to the undivided subcontinent. After I was required right here, I was right here. After I was required there, I was there and I would sustain coming and going.”
“Although it wasn’t ever easy to approach back and race,” Amy*, added from beside her.
“No, it has by no means been,” Shireen agreed softly.
It was November 2012 and I was sitting with Shireen and Amy, two sisters, in their dwelling nestled in an affluent neighbourhood in town of Lahore. I was researching for my first e book, The Footprints of Partition. Ever since I had first heard about Shireen and Amy’s fable, I had wanted to learn extra about their experiences in 1947 and the following decades. Shireen, then in her early 80s, and Amy, 12 years youthful, were from the Zoroastrian community, regularly also referred to as the Parsi community (a title affirm to South Asian Zoroastrians).
I had first met them a year prior, as part of an oral history mission for The Voters Archive of Pakistan (CAP), a non-income dedicated to cultural and historical preservation. With a dwindling population in Lahore, Shireen and Amy were two other folks my colleagues and I interviewed to doc the history and traditions of Zoroastrians. Since then, we had kept in contact. They were warm and hospitable, introducing my colleagues and me to diversified contributors of the community, inviting us to partake in community festivities and opening their dwelling to us. It was during one in every of these interactions that I had learned that while Shireen was Indian, her sister, Amy, was Pakistani.
Born decades after the partition, amid rising animosity between India and Pakistan, it was sophisticated for me to imagine two sisters divided by adversarial notions of nationality. Nonetheless such was the reality for families that had been separated in 1947 when the British carved the subcontinent into two, drawing lines haphazardly, slicing villages and towns in half.
Partition had led to at least one in every of the largest migrations the realm had ever witnessed, with approximately 12 million other folks crossing the newly established borders of India and Pakistan: Muslims moving west and Hindus and Sikhs east. In official history although, puny attention was paid to what happened to the communities caught in between. What were the lived implications for of us adore Shireen and Amy? What did it mean for one to turn into Indian and the diversified Pakistani? What did it mean to have a sisterhood partitioned?
Muslim refugees are evacuated from areas of unrest in Original Delhi, taking refuge in the corners of the ancient walls of Purana Qila, the conventional fort, in Original Delhi, India on September 17, 1947, during the partition of India and Pakistan [Max Desfor/AP]
‘Savor sugar in the milk’
As is described in the e book, A White Trail: A Sail into the Heart of Pakistan’s Spiritual Communities, by Haroon Khalid: “It is believed that upon the spread of Islam to Persia in the seventh century CE, a small band of Zoroastrians – a dominant religion in the way unless then – area out from Persia and came across their way to Sanjan, a city in fresh-day Gujrat, India. Upon arriving, the leader of the community despatched a message to the ruler and asked him for permission to live there. When the request was declined, the leader asked for a bowl of milk and some sugar. He blended a handful of sugar into the milk and despatched it back, with a message that the Parsi community can be adore sugar in the milk: invisible but fresh. He promised that his community would mix in, adopting local customs and tradition, while by no means preaching or converting others to their religion.
“The king was impressed and the community was allowed to determine. They were eventually given the title of “Parsi” – the oldsters who came from Persia. Upholding the promise made by their leader,