As someone who writes about Independence and the 1947 Partition all year round, the month of August feels particularly strange, despite its commemorative status, and the feeling inside my heart on the two historic days - 14th and 15th - is uniquely hollow. A thread 1/
These dates weigh on me, as they may also weigh on those who lived through them in 1947. I find myself wondering, year after year, do the people who witnessed Partition celebrate life and freedom, or mourn the price they paid for that freedom, or do both? 2/
I don’t know, but perhaps this is a question I should include in my interviews henceforth. But I wish that in the zealous way in which we celebrate the independence of the conjoined twins India and Pakistan, we could also celebrate the life they shared before August 1947. 3/
And like every year, now too, I am thinking about a piece that Asif Noorani sahib wrote for Dawn many years ago, where he stood at the Radcliffe Line at Wagah and watched the birds fly from one side to the other, for there existed no border in the sky. 4/
He watched the trees that grew from here to there, the single field separated by barbed wire, the wind that blew from this side to that, the sun that set uniformly on both, and thought to himself what the nationality of the natural world was. I always think to myself 5/
is nature so malleable that it's able to shift its citizenship from Indian to Pakistani or vice versa, as when and where it grows? Does the sun become one or the other as it rises; does the rain fall first on Attari or Wagah, for there are merely 6 inches that separate the two 6/
Are there things that have remained unaffected by the politics of Partition, that can so easily survive - and thrive - on both sides? If so, then the answer could only be due to the fact that the land had once been one, and no amount of years can erase that. 7/7
