Stories begin in memories. This one has its origins in a walking history, if there is such a thing. It finds its start in the early 1980s when I was seven years old. We lived in a small North Indian town called Moga, just thirty kilometers from the border with Pakistan. My grandfather had recently died, and Biji, my grandma, had come to live with us. She and I were forced to share a room and developed the love-hate relationship that inevitably ensues when a child finds herself rooming with a seventy-five-year-old grandparent.¹

Biji had many rituals—waking up at...

Anilji and I have spent two hours combing every corner of his retirement flat. The birth certificate must be found, because “we must begin at the beginning,” says Anilji.¹ We eventually find it well preserved between two old photographs from Karachi. It establishes Anil Vohra as a “British Subject” born in Karachi in 1930. “Why is it important?” I naively ask this seventy-seven-year-old man. He says it’s not important, but it establishes where he’s from. He wasn’t born in Pakistan; there was no Pakistan, he was Indian, and a British subject. Home can be about origins.

Kiranji, an eighty-seven-year-old refugee,...

I would like to tell you a complete story, if there can be such a thing. I could begin dramatically, by asking you to imagine the moment when the Musalman’s axe hits Labbi Devi’s head and her husband’s,¹ leaving them half dead on the rail tracks. They are on a goods train that is bringing them from Pakistan to India in September 1947, a month after the country has been partitioned. Before they are attacked, a Muslim mob has tried, repeatedly, to abduct Labbi Devi. She is a twenty-year-old beautiful young woman who describes herself, simply, as having had thick...

An image secures itself in my mind. A young refugee woman, no more than twenty-one years of age, rides an old black bicycle around the streets of Darya Ganj in what is now called Old Delhi. She’s in search of an old man said to be hoarding books.

An image is often the place where a story anchors itself. An image might even become a story. This image is not Kiranji’s story, but these scenes are how I first came to know her. So here, I travel into a story before the story—a necessary wandering that led me to...

The first months of fieldwork are the most strenuous of the seven transatlantic trips for this project. I am trying to locate the families that I will work with—a task that might seem easy in a city where there are millions of Partition refugees, yet is a little more complex than one would think. The blistering 45 degrees Celsius (about 110 degrees Fahrenheit) temperatures of the North Indian summer drive families to the hill stations along the Himalayan foothills, and so much of my time is spent trying to coordinate meetings in between their travel schedules. And then there...

I walk down the stairs from my study on the second level of my house in Ohio and step into the living room. I pause, as I often do, in front of the paintingMatajiand wonder who she is, where she is from, and what she is thinking. Does she miss her home in Pakistan? Is she reminiscing or is she in mourning? In my mind, Biji and Mataji have become one person. Not an entirely implausible morphing, because Mataji is certainly a composite visual representation of an older-generation female Partition refugee. She is the grandmother I knew as...

The monsoon rains arrive, providing some respite from the blistering heat that seizes Delhi every summer. This July it has rained almost every day, thankfully lowering the temperatures, making it bearable to step outside. Papa and I walk the ten minutes it takes to get to Mohanji’s home. He lives just a street away from ours, and they know each other through their morning walks in the neighborhood park. Some days I join Papa for his walks in the park that adjoins my parents’ home. That is where I meet Mohanji. He is hard to miss with his loud recitations...

The scowl on Papa’s face is deepening. For almost an hour now we have been driving in circles looking for the house of Arjunji’s daughter Rekha, in Gurgaon. We keep going past identical, dust-laden high-rise construction sites that have become near-permanent eyesores in this Delhi suburb. A big dry cloud of dust with no infrastructure—that is what Papa calls this affluent locality. Our dilemma is our own fault; we were given a landmark that we forgot to note down, and a phone number that we forgot to feed into our mobile phones. I start to regret not having asked...