Sticking to the letter

Even as the memories of partition may be fading with each generation, efforts to preserve its deeply personal stories, both in literature and cinema, continue. In his debut novel, Dear Zahira, With Love, Sachin NG turns to letters exchanged between two people separated by a border to explore Partition not as a historical event, but as an intimate story of love, longing and loss.

The novel, based on a true story, focuses on Havildaar Ghulam Ali and Zahira Raza, and draws from the letters they exchanged between 1958 and 1960. Set in Lucknow, it explores the aftermath of Partition and the ways in which its upheaval continued to shape ordinary lives.

Zahira falls in love with Ghulam Ali, a limb fitter who helps design a new prosthetic limb for her. Their happiness is short-lived. Ghulam Ali is taken away by the Indian Army on suspicion of being a jasoos. Having previously served in the Pakistan Army, he is not allowed to remain in India despite his attempts to prove his loyalty. “What hurt me more than the blows was the word they kept using. Jasoos. I heard it again and again, said with certainty, as if it explained my whole life.”

When Zahira becomes pregnant, the couple is separated by borders, and letters become their only means of communication. The letters document the stigma related to a single unmarried woman raising a child, Zubeida, on her own in the 1950s. “The neighbours will talk loudly enough for me to hear. My office will judge me. Naani will not stop shouting. Even stepping out to the bazaar will become difficult. It takes very little for a woman to lose respect in this world.”

Zahira’s story also offers a glimpse into the lives of women negotiating a newly independent India. Physically disabled, yet professionally independent and socially respected, she makes the unconventional choice to remain unmarried and raise her daughter on her own. Such stories of women making bold choices in the years after Independence rarely find their way into conventional accounts of Partition.

Known primarily for his non-fiction, NG’s encounter with the story began unexpectedly. It was in Pakistan that he first encountered the story of Ghulam Ali through Taqseem-e-Hind, a dastangoi performance on Partition. The novel, following the instinct of a non-fiction writer, is also attentive to the bureaucracy that followed Partition: the paperwork, citizenship claims and painstaking procedures involved in crossing borders. At times, this attention to detail slows the narrative, with little dramatic action until the closing letter, in which Ghulam writes to his daughter explaining why her mother left him.

Stories such as these remind us that history is not only made up of dates, borders and political decisions. Sometimes, it survives in letters—preserving the lives, loves and losses that official histories leave behind.