Lost in Partition: A Hindu Family’s Journey of Survival and Belonging

The Last Road

I remember the moment clearly, not because it was special, but because it was nothing at all. A moment like any other, in which history reached into our lives, pried open our hearts, and made everything we thought we knew irrelevant. It was 1947, August, the month that hung in the air like a heavy monsoon cloud, waiting to pour, waiting to flood, waiting to wash away everything we thought was permanent.

My family—a Hindu family—had lived in the same house in Lahore for three generations. Lahore wasn’t just a city. It was the smell of the flowers my mother grew in the garden, the clink of my father’s brass coins as he counted them at night, the loud voices of vendors pushing their carts down the street. Lahore was a rhythm, a song, a hum of the old and the new that folded itself into our lives, our food, our sleep. It was where we were, always had been, where we would stay.

But that August, everything changed. Words like “Partition” were tossed around at the dinner table, first as vague rumors, then with the sharpness of a knife. My brother, Dev, was the first to say it:
“They’re dividing it, you know. The land, the people, everything.”
We looked at him as if he had spoken in a foreign language, as if he’d told us the sky was splitting in two and half of it was floating away.
“Who is dividing what?” asked my mother.
“It’s all falling apart. We have to choose a side.”

My father grunted from his chair, his eyes still fixed on the ground. He said nothing, but the lines in his face deepened, creases forming where there were none before. He did not want to choose. None of us did.
“We are not like that,” my mother said softly, folding her sari tighter around her. “We are not political.”
But the thing about politics is that it doesn’t care whether you are or not. It doesn’t wait for you to have an opinion. It comes to your door whether you like it or not, kicks it down, and drags you into the streets.

And so, on August 14, the news came. Lahore would belong to Pakistan. Our home was no longer ours. It was a sentence that hung in the air like an unwelcome guest. It didn’t belong here, in our courtyard, where we played cricket, or in the kitchen, where my mother cooked dal every night. How could a boundary, drawn by people who had never lived here, never eaten our food, suddenly change everything?

The violence came swiftly, like the heat before a storm. It crept into our neighborhood in whispers and then in screams. One night, we heard the neighbors’ doors slam, and then, nothing. Just silence. But it was a different kind of silence, not the peaceful quiet of a summer night, but the thick, suffocating silence of fear. We didn’t ask what happened. We knew.

And that was the beginning of the end. My father sat us down.
“We will leave,” he said, as if he were talking about going to the market for supplies. “We must.”
“Leave?” my mother’s voice cracked. “Where will we go?”
“East,” my father said. “Where we are supposed to be now. Where they say we belong.”
“But we belong here,” I said, the words slipping out before I could stop them. “This is our home.”
He looked at me, his eyes old, tired, as if he had aged a lifetime in that one sentence.
“Not anymore.”

And so, we packed. Slowly, at first, because packing meant admitting that it was real, that we were leaving Lahore. The brass plates we used for dinner, my mother’s saris folded and refolded, my brother’s books that he insisted on taking even though we had no space. What do you take when you leave everything behind? What is important? What is necessary? How do you decide which memories to carry with you and which to leave behind?

We left on foot, walking along the narrow roads that stretched eastward, toward the promise of safety, or at least, the promise of something else. There were thousands of us. Families. Mothers carrying babies. Fathers with bundles on their heads. The elderly, lagging behind, and the children, too small to understand what was happening. And yet, somehow, we moved as one, a river of people, flowing away from everything they had ever known. The land under our feet was still the same, the dust rising in the same way it always had, but it no longer felt like ours. Each step we took was a step away from home, and each step felt like a betrayal.

I remember seeing a Muslim family walking the other way, heading west, toward Lahore. We looked at each other, our eyes locking for just a second. They were leaving their home, too. Their grief was the same as ours. And yet, we passed each other without a word. What could we say? There were no words to bridge the distance between us now.

The nights were the worst. We would huddle together, the four of us, my father’s arm around my mother, my brother and I lying close, listening to the sound of the night—the rustle of the wind, the occasional distant scream, the silence that filled the space between the stars. My father did not speak much. He did not have to. The loss was etched into his face, into the lines around his eyes, into the way he held my mother’s hand as if he was afraid she might disappear, too.

Days turned into weeks, and still, we walked. The road was endless, stretching before us like an unspoken question. Where would it lead? What would we find at the end of it? Would there be another home? Could there be? Or was this our new life, a life of walking, of never stopping, of never belonging?

We reached the border at Amritsar after what felt like a lifetime. The camp was crowded, filled with faces that mirrored our own—tired, lost, searching for something that no longer existed. There were rumors of violence, of riots breaking out even here, in this supposed place of refuge. But we stayed. Where else could we go?

We were given a tent, a small one, too small for all of us, but we made do. My mother tried to recreate some sense of normalcy. She cooked what little food we had. My brother and I played in the dirt, pretending we were back in Lahore, that this was just a game, and that any moment, we would return home. But we never did.

One night, as we sat around a small fire, my father spoke.
“We were the lucky ones,” he said.
“Lucky?” I looked at him, confused. “How can you say that? We’ve lost everything.”
He shook his head. “We’ve lost our home, yes. But we are together. We are alive. So many others are not.”
And I realized then what he meant. Luck is a strange thing. It doesn’t look like what you expect. It doesn’t feel like winning. It feels like surviving, like holding on when everything else has been torn away.

The road that led us here was long, and it wasn’t the last road we would walk. There would be more, many more. But for now, we were here, together, and that was something.

Lahore was gone. But we were still here. And maybe that was enough.

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