Chandigarh: For most Punjabis born after Independence – and certainly for anyone under the age of 60 today – Partition is almost impossible to comprehend. The scale of the upheaval, the speed and cynicism with which ordinary lives were overturned and the sudden collapse of communities that had coexisted for generations, belong to an era difficult to imagine in contemporary India.Yet for those of us who grew up in Punjab in the decades that followed, Partition was never something we learnt from history books. We simply grew up with it.It lived in family conversations, surfaced at weddings and funerals and emerged unexpectedly whenever parents and older relatives gathered together. Most households seemed to possess their own story of loss, escape, friendship, betrayal or survival and, growing up in Punjab through the Fifties and Sixties, one absorbed all these memories almost by osmosis.Of all the Partition stories I heard growing up, the ones that remain most vivid today are also the most personal. They ranged from Lahore, then the vibrant capital of undivided Punjab, to our ancestral village of Dera Baba Nanak on the banks of the Ravi River in Gurdaspur district, situated today on the International Border with Pakistan.Revered by Sikhs as the place associated with Guru Nanak’s final years before his passing at adjoining Kartarpur in 1539, the village found itself at the centre of an altogether different drama in mid-August 1947, when for two extraordinary days neither it nor its inhabitants knew whether they belonged to India or Pakistan.As Independence approached on August 15, a strange stillness settled over Dera, and for the next 48 hours confusion reigned.Nobody knew whether the village, or indeed the whole of Muslim-majority Gurdaspur district – and the largest in Punjab – would become part of India or Pakistan, as everyone anxiously awaited the Radcliffe Award, the hurried boundary decision that would formally divide both Punjab and Bengal. The fate of millions rested on the judgement of Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British barrister who had never visited India and who, armed with little more than a fountain pen, a few outdated maps and ethnic surveys, and five weeks of preparation, was tasked with partitioning an entire subcontinent and deciding the destiny of millions.Family folklore recalled a community holding its breath as rumours raced through the village, faster than facts could catch up. Some claimed Pakistani officials would arrive within hours; others insisted Indian troops were already on their way. Government officials quietly disappeared from Dera, while families hurriedly packed their belongings, not knowing whether they would wake the next morning in India or Pakistan.That uncertainty was particularly acute at Dera’s railway station, a critical link connecting Amritsar to Sialkot and onwards to Lahore. Security was reinforced around the platforms, signal cabins and outlying buildings, as armed bands appeared on both sides of the Ravi and reports filtered in of massacres on trains elsewhere in Punjab.Finally, on August 17, two days after formal independence and the creation of India and Pakistan, the decision arrived: Gurdaspur district was to remain in India, while only Shakargarh, one of its four tehsils, would go to Pakistan. Relief swept through Dera, but by then another drama was already unfolding.Also read: Why Punjab’s Wounds Must Not Be Reopened – The Long Walk to ReconciliationColumns of refugees fleeing West Punjab began passing through the village carrying whatever possessions they had managed to salvage. Many still believed their displacement would be temporary and hoped one day to recover their valuables, some concealed gold sovereigns, jewellery and family heirlooms inside mud walls and beneath floors of houses they occupied for a night or two, before moving on.They never returned. Years later, some of these hidden caches resurfaced, usually after heavy monsoon rains brought down old walls, reviving tales of buried treasure that continue to circulate even today. Yet what emerged from those walls was more than gold; it was evidence of lives interrupted in mid-sentence.The railway, too, carried away the remnants of that vanished world, as the final train from Dera Baba Nanak to Narowal departed in September 1947, marking more than the end of a railway service. It severed friendships, commercial ties, family connections and shared histories that had linked communities across undivided Punjab for generations.And while Dera spent those anxious August days awaiting its fate, my parents were witnessing a very different drama unfold in Lahore. Indeed, some of their most vivid memories of Partition began long before 1947 itself, in a city that, until then, was, for many, the very embodiment of Punjab’s plural and cosmopolitan character.Anne’s LahoreAnne, my mother, had arrived in Lahore as a young bride from Ramsbury in Wiltshire, England, in 1936 after marrying my father, then studying for the Bar in London. She fell in love with the city almost immediately and spoke of it with unabated affection for the rest of her life, until she passed on in 2005. To her, Lahore was not merely the capital of undivided Punjab; it was one of the most enchanting, cultured and cosmopolitan cities she had ever encountered.Its tree-lined boulevards, bustling bazaars, cafés, clubs and gardens possessed a warmth and vitality that she never found quite replicated elsewhere. Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs mixed with an ease that seemed entirely natural, friendships routinely transcended religious boundaries, and the city’s intellectual and social life flourished in an atmosphere of remarkable openness. Even decades later, after living in numerous cities across India, she continued to regard pre-Partition Lahore as one of the most charming and civilised places she had ever known.But by the summer of 1947, the Punjab both my parents loved and cherished was beginning to unravel.As Lord Louis Mountbatten’s abruptly imposed August 15 deadline for Independence – and the Punjab’s inevitable Partition – approached, communal tensions intensified across the province and uncertainty spread through cities and villages alike. Seeking respite from the growing unease in Lahore, my parents repaired to Dalhousie, the tranquil colonial-era hill town in Chamba in the Himalayan foothills, as they and countless other Punjabis did each summer.But the gathering turmoil was not to be escaped so easily. One morning in early August 1947, standing on the veranda of the cottage loaned to them by Anwar Mohammad, one of my father’s closest friends from London’s Middle Temple, my parents watched helplessly as a Hindu mob emerged through the monsoon mist, looting and setting cottages ablaze as it advanced. One by one, homes disappeared behind walls of smoke and flame, and as the fire crept ever nearer, so too did the awful certainty that Anwar’s cottage, the only Muslim-owned property in the area, was among the mob’s intended targets.Trains overflowing with refugees, Punjab 1947. Photo: Wikimedia CommonsThe irony was that Anwar, as my mother recalled years later, was far more than a casual acquaintance. He was one of my father’s closest friends from their student days in England, and my mother often recalled attending his wedding in Lahore only months earlier, when communal tensions were already worsening across Punjab, and rumours of Hindus and Muslims poisoning one another’s food and water circulated widely. Such stories were taken seriously enough for many guests to be wary about where and with whom they ate.Yet Anwar would hear none of it. Knowing that my father was the only non-Muslim present at the wedding feast, he insisted, despite the concerns expressed by some family members, that he eat from his personal thali, publicly guaranteeing his safety. It was a simple but memorable gesture of trust and friendship that remained with my mother for the rest of her life.‘Buying the house’ from Barrister MohammadIt was therefore especially painful for my parents to watch the communal bonds that had once seemed so natural begin to unwind. And, as the mob drew closer to Anwar’s cottage in Dalhousie, my mother recalled my father deftly removing his brass nameplate from the entrance and, using her red nail varnish paint his own name onto a makeshift wooden replacement and nailing it to a tree in the driveway.When the mob finally reached the house and demanded that the occupants stand aside so they could burn down the Muslim’s cottage, my father pointed to the freshly painted – and still wet – nameplate and calmly informed them that the property now belonged to him as he had bought it from Barrister Mohammad. If they wished to torch it, he had said, they would first have to burn him, my mother and my then seven-year-old elder brother too.“The next few seconds were the longest I have ever lived through,” my mother reminisced decades later in New Delhi. Maybe, she said, it was the collective fear on all our faces, or perhaps even our apparent determination, but for some reason the crowd turned around and headed up the hillside to ravage the neighbouring cottage which, ironically, belonged to a Hindu.“Though momentarily saved, Anwar’s home was ransacked the day after we returned to Lahore,” she recollected, before fleeing almost immediately thereafter to live in partitioned India. When we returned to Dalhousie for the last time in 1951, the temporary nameplate, bleached clean by the elements, and the tree to which it had been tied, were all that remained of Anwar’s cottage, she remembered.Back in Lahore, Hindu-Muslim rioting had reached such a pitch as August 15 approached that my parents were advised, like millions of others, to flee to Amritsar, barely 30 miles away, which was almost certain to remain in India. They left, like countless other Punjabis, convinced that the separation would be temporary and that they would soon return, as there was also speculation that Lahore would be a part of India.‘Merely stepping away’Years later, my mother often recalled leaving her Favre-Leuba wristwatch on the mantelpiece as they fled their Model Town home. They reasoned that there seemed little point taking everything with them when they expected to be away for just a few weeks. She never saw the watch or the house again. Of everything left behind, only three things were eventually recovered and sent to them via influential friends weeks later: my father’s prized Nash convertible, a Singer sewing machine, which worked for years thereafter and a threadbare Persian carpet that was soon discarded.Also read: Punjab 1947: Bloodied and Partitioned by Competing NationalismsIronically, my mother’s abandoned watch has always seemed to me the Lahore counterpart of the jewellery and gold coins hidden in the walls of Dera Baba Nanak’s houses. In both instances, people behaved not as though they were abandoning their lives forever, but as though they were merely stepping away until the madness passed. The idea that Partition could actually happen – and that the divide would become permanent – was almost beyond comprehension for many Punjabis.Yet Partition became a harsh reality, and a border hastily drawn by a British barrister who had never been to India became a permanent divide, severing communities, towns and villages and making return impossible. Its arbitrary and brutal imposition, carried out with scant regard for its human consequences, unleashed violence that claimed around a million lives, as neighbours turned on neighbours and trains arrived at stations in either country, filled with the dead. Millions more were forced from their homes, becoming refugees almost overnight, leaving behind possessions, friendships and entire ways of life.That was the Partition I inherited growing up in independent India’s Punjab – not as a political event, but through the lives and memories of those who lived through it: ordinary folk who lost homes, possessions, friendships and familiar worlds. Beneath even the darkest recollections, however, ran a deeper nostalgia for what had been – the Lahore of my mother’s youth, the united Punjab of intertwined communities and friendships, and a way of life that Partition abruptly and irrevocably swept away.India celebrated Independence Day on Saturday. But for my fading generation of Punjabis, raised on the stories of Partition, perhaps the most fitting salute is to remember the undivided Punjab that existed before the line was drawn – a province that survives only in fading photographs, family recollections and the stubborn memory of a world that once seemed eternal.